![]() ![]() Kansas News Service Homes on the outskirts of Manhattan overlook a gully full of eastern red cedars adjacent to a prairie. In 2017, researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln looked back three decades and found a fivefold increase in how much land burns annually in large wildfires on the Great Plains. These fires struck in mid-December - not a time of year when firefighters traditionally fight wildfires. Scattered blazes burned thousands of acres elsewhere across western Kansas at the same time. In late 2021, flames swept across more than 120,000 acres of Russell, Ellis, Osborne and Rooks counties. These outskirts bring humans and their combustible property - from outbuildings and paint cans to propane tanks - into close proximity with more vegetation and less fire-thwarting pavement. So do the edges of population centers, which professionals call the “wildland-urban interface.” The Flint Hills and some other rural areas stand out on the map. The tool represents a yearslong effort to combine satellite imagery with on-the-ground research. ![]() Keeping the roof and gutters clear of leaves and needles is similarly important. Standard steps for homeowners include allowing only scattered trees immediately around your house and removing any dead plants. It lets users download a report specific to their home address or another location, and offers recommendations that would help keep flames at bay if a wildfire were to sweep the area. features an interactive map that combines the frequency of past wildfires with the amount of combustible fuel in an area to pinpoint trouble spots. “A massive amount of fires happen there,” he said. So do rural areas north and east of that city in Reno County and three adjacent counties, because of a confluence of factors including widespread cedar invasion, Neely said. The outskirts of Hutchinson, for example, face significant wildfire risk. A large swath of land to the north and east of Hutchinson (in Reno, Rice, McPherson and Harvey counties) faces significant risks. Kansas Forest Service The new Wildfire Risk Explorer shows extreme and high risk of wildfire in red and orange, respectively. Those bad things include, most notably, the eastern red cedars that are spreading fast across the Great Plains and that can launch fountains of dangerous embers high into the air when they catch fire in dry conditions. “All sorts of bad things start growing in there.” “I’m not knocking hobby farms, but if you buy them, you’ve got to manage them,” said Mark Neely, the Kansas Forest Service’s fire management officer. Others may only visit their properties when it’s time to bag a whitetail, and don’t stick around to manage the land. These trends can increase wildfire risks in those areas because some landowners don’t have the resources or knowledge to control problematic vegetation. Or the popularity among city dwellers and out-of-staters of buying their own slice of rural Kansas for deer hunting. Take the proliferation of homes with several acres of land each at the fringes of suburbia. The risk of that varies greatly across the state. In Kansas, risks are particularly high on the outskirts of some cities, as well as in rural areas of the state with aggressively spreading tree and shrub species that intensify grassland blazes.īut Kansans can take steps to protect themselves and their property.Īnd now they can type their addresses into a new online tool from the Kansas Forest Service - to better understand the danger that a wildfire could break out near their home, ranch, farm or business. Large wildfires have become much more common on the Great Plains in recent decades.
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