ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second story recapping the debriefing of the recent fires in the area Monday afternoon with the Seward County Commission. This story discusses the efforts of county departments to get the blazes under control, evacuating residents and helping with shelter needs.
Following Interim Fire Chief Braden Steckel’s recap of the timeline of the fires that hit parts of at least three area counties in mid-February, other first responder department heads gave their thoughts on the response to those fires and what worked and did not work.
First up was Seward County Sheriff Gene Ward, who said one of the problems with the response was the lack of a command center, and he said his department should have taken charge of getting that in place.
“We were too busy trying to get people evacuated,” he said. “If this happens again, that should be one of the first things we do.”
Ward said the sheriff’s office had 13 personnel respond to assist in evacuation and monitoring fires.
“Contact was attempted at approximately 29 homes in the southwest Seward County area,” he said. “Contact was also made at Seven Winds RV Park. We contacted Lone Start Business and the other areas around there.”
Ward said he and his deputies later transferred to River Road to help evacuate residents there before the fire arrived.
“There was only one house that’s even occupied,” he said. “Everything else was vacant, and they had already taken the lady who lives there and moved her away.”
Ward said contact was made with farmers and ranchers in the area who were busy moving cattle at the time.
“Seward County had two residences that were in danger,” he said.
Residents of the Thorpe family home near Hayne, which was completely destroyed in a fire, were contacted by Deputy Clemente Torres, who was off duty at the time, and Ward said the family was thankful for the efforts.
“Thankfully, they were evacuated just minutes before the fire overtook their homes,” Ward said. “While off duty, Clemente became aware of the fire moving towards the Thorpe family farm. Without hesitation, he reached out to ensure they were notified. Because of his quick thinking and initiative, the family was able to evacuate safely, including a handicapped brother and a bedridden grandmother, just minutes before the fire reached the property.”
Ward said Torres’s actions reflect the highest standards of the sheriff’s office’s service, dedication and community commitment.
“Being off duty did not lessen his sense of responsibility at all,” Ward said. “He demonstrates how service is not just a shift he works. It’s his mindset. We are very proud to have him on our team, and his actions are true credit to this office and the community we serve.”
Road and Bridge Director Marc Johnson said after receiving a call Tuesday, Feb. 17, of fire breaking out, he sent a truck from his department to help with the Tyrone, Okla., fire.
“We were on that fire until about 8 p.m., and prior to that, my foreman called and said there was a request for blades on the river fire,” he said. “We had four blades on the river fire for two and a half days with our dozer. For the amount of training my guys have fighting fire, which is slim, I couldn’t be more proud of them on how they did it, how they contributed to stop the fire.”
Johnson said the radios Road and Bridge were using did not function well in the river bottom.
“It was very concerning when you would call out for someone, they wouldn’t answer back for 10 to 15 minutes,” he said. “You don’t know what’s going on with them. You would lose communication depending on where you were at down there.”
Johnson said county responders received many compliments from surrounding firefighters, as well as those from Olathe, the Kansas National Guard and the Kansas Forest Service.
“They would take our guys in a heartbeat to go fight a fire somewhere,” he said. “Hats off to those guys who helped and our maintenance crew for keeping our equipment running through that time.”
EMS Director John Ralston said the county has two generations of radios for communication.
“The ones we had prior to that, we got through Homeland Security, and those radios, they can take the programming, but you can’t encrypt those through the older ones,” he said. “That’s what they have. They can be programmed with the same exact frequencies except for the their trip channels. We could up that to where they’d have communications on several frequencies with the state template.”
“They just can’t have law enforcement channels,” Ward said.
Johnson said Road and Bridge crews were on scene for 48 straight hours.
“We were rotating people and watched the water tanker,” he said. “Our dozer operator, Dustin Bozarth, was called out on leave that Friday morning to assist with the mop up and pushing up of trees.”
Like others at the debriefing, Ralston said communication definitely needs to be improved.
“We were very limited on our needs for this,” he said. “We’re health, and we respond to people hurt. We didn’t have any. We were fortunate that week. Out of the 124 calls last month, we only had 13 that week during that fire. We were planning ahead, thinking we were going to have an increase with respiratory distress and things like that in the community.”
Ralston said the Local Emergency Planning Committee likewise was planning for a large patient load from the fires, but few, if any, were seen.
“We were able to have good staffing from the EMS standpoint for the first three days of it,” he said. “We were mentally staffed on Thursday and Friday, so we had to backfill a little bit there.”
Adding to the communication concern, Ralston said, is having many assets in different locations.
“Communications get tough,” he said. “Keeping track of things gets tough, and there’s no easy way to solve it. We always strive to do better each time as we identify these things, and we’ve identified some things we can do to help do that.”
Ralston said the outpouring of assistance from the community was very much appreciated as firefighting efforts continued.
“You cannot do one of these events without that outpouring,” he said. “We’ve got to have that, and I applaud everybody who came out there and helped. We’re out there risking everything, and without that extra help, this thing would still be burning.”
Seward County Health Department Director Brie Greeson said her department was in place for community readiness and to assist with EMS and mass care. She added shortly after 4 p.m. Feb. 17, the health department had been notified a shelter had been opened at the Activity Center.
“There was some confusion,” she said. “I wasn’t notified prior to that. Three staff were sent to run the shelter.”
With no one showing up at the shelter, Greeson said the shelter was closed around 7 p.m., and she had been in communications with Liberal Area Coalition for Families Director Sarah Mersdorf-Foreman, as the coalition had a shelter set up at Crosspoint Church in Liberal.
“They also had nobody show up there,” Greeson said. “They both closed around 7. One of our strengths a fast response. We knew where our equipment was. Andrew and I had gone over a whole bunch of that in the weeks prior.”
Greeson said should similar situations arise in the future with fires on the west side of town, the Activity Center may not be ideal for a shelter.
“We had a lot of smoke in that,” she said. “We had the fans turned on. The whole town was smoky. If we had patients with oxygen and other medical capabilities who didn’t need to be sent to Southwest Medical Center and we were managing them there, a thought we might need to look into for next time is somewhere centrally located, possibly bringing our HEPA filters and some of those things to help clear the air out.”
Greeson said SCHD officials also received many calls and texts asking if pets could be brought to shelters with their owners.
“We initially told them yes because we didn’t know how widescale everything was at the time, but they had to be in a carrier,” she said. “On our end, we’re going to work with the Southwest Kansas Healthcare Initiative. They’re working on some stuff with our five-county region on a trail that would have pet needs along with cots, blankets and all of those things. We do have some extra funding inside of PHEP, Public Health Emergency Preparedness, to possibly be purchasing more cots.”
