Sioux Center, Iowa — Even after asking northwest Iowa farmers to take a break and turn off the harvesting equipment on a windy Wednesday, Sioux Center Fire Chief David Van Holland says his department still had to respond to two field fires that day. And he even needed to request farmers come to the scene with tillage equipment to create fire breaks.
The first call, about 10 minutes before 3 p.m. was near 400th Street and Fig Avenue, which is about five miles west of Sioux Center. He says firefighters from Sioux Center, Rock Valley, Hawarden, and Maurice responded to that fire. They even put out a request on their Nixle service for farmers to come to the scene with disks. He says about 20 farmers showed up and helped them put out the fire. They disked down about 20 acres of standing corn to create a fire break, and about 10 acres of standing corn burned. He says he thinks it was started by a pickup.
The second call was only minutes later, and only about two and a half miles away, near 390th Street and Garfield Avenue. He says one of the Sioux Center units and the Hull Fire Department extinguished that fire with help from four farmers with disks that were actually en route to the other scene. He says luckily only cornstalks burned in the second fire.
He says they were out about two hours. Van Holland is still asking farmers to keep a disk hooked up and ready in every field they are harvesting.
On Tuesday, the Hartley Fire Department put out a fire at their tree dump, which was either started by someone discarding something hot, or by embers from a three-week-old fire at the dump. The fire destroyed tree debris, mulch, and some bean stubble in an adjacent field, but they were able to stop it before it reached the railroad tracks. Fire Chief Brad Meendering says that evening they were called out again to put out a combine fire northwest of Hartley. Something was burning on the inside of the combine, but there was negligible damage after they made sure it was out.
