Granville, Iowa — With the extremely dry weather we’ve been having, a strange type of fire is popping up in our area. Twenty-five acres of growing soybeans were destroyed in a fire last week near Granville.
According to Granville Fire Chief Karl Kellen, one afternoon, the Granville Fire Department was called to the report of a field fire near 5330 500th Street, seven miles east of Granville and four miles south.
The chief says the fire department saw a soybean field that had been planted into no-till corn stover from last fall. He says they think what happened was someone had been spraying fence lines and the fire may have started from a spark or the exhaust pipe of the UTV. With the dry material on the ground from last fall, the fire took hold, and actually ended up burning the growing soybean plants and destroying about 25 acres of soybeans.
Kellen says no injuries were reported. He says they knocked down the fire with water and then a farmer disked around where the fire had been to make sure it didn’t flare back up and spread further.
He tells us that the fire was actually in Paullina’s territory, but the two departments respond together to calls east of Granville and west of Paullina. He says the Granville firefighters were first on the scene and it looked like they could handle it, so they radioed to dispatch that the Paullina firefighters could disregard.
Chief Kellen says when someone noticed the fire, they called one of the Granville firefighters on their cell phone. Kellen reminds people — even if they are friends with a firefighter, if there’s a fire, call 911. That’s the way to ensure the quickest and best response.
He says the firefighters who responded were on the scene for a half an hour or so.
