Liberty Belle
Well-known member
Ranchers battle back from drought, fires
By Kevin Woster, Journal Staff Writer
WHITE OWL — The thin red line separating charred earth from brown grass on the hillside across from Brett Bronson's front porch shows how close he came to losing it all.
It also makes him choke up — in that strained, embarrassed way strong men battle stronger emotions — when he thinks about three days of fire, the tireless help of his neighbors and an airplane rumbling in low to paint his pasture with a ruddy strip of fire-retardant slurry that saved his home.
"The neighbors came for miles. Words can't express the generosity of the people who came here and fought that thing, some of them for 36 hours straight," Bronson said last week from the front-porch shade of his ranch house. "And had it not been for that slurry bomber, we wouldn't be standing here today."
All across the parched plains of central and western South Dakota, ranchers like Bronson are offering similar praise for firefighters who rushed by land and by air to the scene of dozens of wildfires. Seldom have so many fires flared up — often from a smoldering lightning strike on the tinder-dry prairie — in so many places at once.
And never in recent history have so many grown so large.
"We've lived with prairie fires ever since I was a kid," said state Agriculture Secretary Larry Gabriel, who ranches north of Cottonwood. "But I've never seen fires that grow in size as rapidly as they are this year."
A complex of fires burned 30,000 acres on Standing Rock Indian Reservation in Corson County recently and 30,000 more in Perkins County to the west. Last week, along with a variety of smaller blazes, crews battled fires of 2,300 acres in southwest Ziebach County east of Howes, 4,500 acres near Enning, 2,000 near Red Owl and 20,000 acres near White Owl, in southeastern Meade County.
It was the White Owl fire — a relentless rogue with a windy appetite for grass — that crept to within a few hundred feet of Bronson's place and created similar close calls for a couple of his neighbors.
The fire started Thursday, Aug. 3, and local fire crews and neighbors held it in check with limited damage that first day.
"It burned 600 acres Thursday, and that night, we had it out," Bronson said. "Then Friday morning, it took off again, and the wind came up and changed directions, and it come up behind us. It was angling right up at us, dead on for the place."
Bronson's place became the incident command headquarters. And the combination of air drops and ground crews kept the fire away from his buildings and equipment as it swept across the surrounding grassland, destroying most of the fall and winter pasture Bronson needs for his cattle herd.
"We pretty much had it out on Friday. Then on Saturday, the wind changed direction again, and away it went on south," Bronson said. "That's when it burned out the summer pasture."
All told, Bronson lost about 3,300 acres of owned and leased pasture, as well as a stack yard of hay bales that apparently, through some puzzling oversight Bronson hasn't yet figured out, wasn't covered by his insurance. He was left with less than 1,000 acres of grass and no hay to take his 175-cow herd into fall and winter.
Like his neighbors, he also faces the prospect of fixing miles of fences damaged or ruined by the fire.
"If you look straight south, there's hardly a standing fence for 10 miles," he said. "It's a mess. But at least we've got the place and the equipment, and we didn't lose anybody."
Bronson knows, too, that he's not alone in what he lost. Just over the hill to the north of Bronson along S.D. Highway 34, Bronson's neighbors escaped from similar close calls with the White Owl Fire but also lost thousands of acres of pasture.
Four days after the blaze was contained, as ranchers in pickups equipped with water tanks patrolled the charred pastures beyond her ranch home, Imogene "Gene" O'Grady sat in her air-conditioned living room and marveled at what was saved.
The land is seared gray-black on three sides of the ranch house and its outbuildings, with the black footprints of the fire nudging into the shelterbelts and edging along a grass strip that accompanies the gravel lane for a quarter-mile out to the highway.
"We're like an oasis here," O'Grady said, as her son, Tom, and great-granddaughter, Shayna, nodded agreement. "We lost quite a bit of pasture. But we're one of the lucky ones. And don't tell me we're not. It could have been so much worse."
O'Grady knows about worse. Three years ago, she lost her home to a chimney fire, a sudden, all-consuming blaze that engulfed the house in spite of the quick response and hard work of local volunteer crews.
Tom O'Grady was working construction in Gillette, Wyo., a job that helps support the family's quarter-horse operation, when the fire exploded Saturday. And Gene O'Grady spent most of the day in the White Owl Post Office a few miles west on Highway 34, listening to the police scanner.
At one point, she heard a frightening report.
"They said on the scanner that there's fire at the Gene O'Grady house. And I said, 'Oh, no, not again,'" O'Grady said. "But then Dean Wink (a neighbor) came on the scanner and said, 'I'm at the O'Grady place. And it's not burning.'"
It turned out the initial report was about an abandoned ranch house nearby.
All of the O'Grady's quarter horses survived the fire, as did the 10 long-horned Corriente cattle in a pasture nearby. The cattle refused to leave a small waterhole that eventually was surrounded by the fire.
The animals survived with some help from above.
"They got down in there around that water and wouldn't leave, so they slurried them," Tom O'Grady said.
"They've got red all over. They looked like heck, but it saved them," Gene added.
Painted cows and burned pastures were a price she was more than willing to pay.
"We're just so lucky. It's a miracle that no one got hurt," she said.
Across the road to the west from O'Grady's, Brad Austin strolled across the blackened prairie a few yards from the ranch house where his 42-year-old brother, Barry, lived before a fatal car accident near Belle Fourche in May.
Brad Austin said his brother's death kept the losses from the fire in proper perspective. But added to drought-related water shortages and the ongoing and expensive necessity to haul water to livestock in pastures where dams are dry or undrinkable, the blaze also made it even more difficult to keep a positive outlook, Austin said.
Still, that's the only way to survive, he said.
"We started out losing my brother, then the drought and the water problems came along, and now the fire," he said. "My dad always told me you got to be optimistic in this business or you won't make it. And we're fortunate that we didn't lose a home or a life."
Austin lives on the south side of Highway 34, across from his parents' home and west from brother's place. The area was at the center of more fire-fighting activity last week, as the fire scorched the earth on three sides of Barry Austin's place.
"They had the traffic stopped on the highway and the slurry bombers and helicopters were overhead. And I don't know how many trucks were out here," Brad Austin said. "There's cattle mixed up all over. The cost of fencing is what's astounding, and the loss of grass. Hopefully, it'll grow back."
Hope is harder to come by these days in the blackened aftermath of a fire that will be remembered for generations. Like other ranchers scarred by this fiery summer, Brett Bronson is trying to figure out how much of his herd he can afford to keep.
In a land where margins are always thin, the fire and the drought leave little room for errors in calculation.
With the hay and much of the grass gone and his three wells fading in the drought, Bronson knows he'll have to sell his calves early. And a fair number of cows — a carefully tended production herd with a genetic mix he likes — could go soon after that.
"I hate to take a lifetime of genetics and get rid of them, but I'm not sure we've got a lot of options," Bronson said. "It pretty well cleaned us out for feed. But we do have the house and the barn. We saved the equipment. And the cattle are still alive."
And if his financial future seems even hazier than before, Bronson can still count the blessings that remain and give thanks to the crews — close friends and complete strangers alike — who helped save them.
"I just choke up when I think about what everybody did," he said. "Because of them, we're still here."
And in a land where optimism is as essential as rain, that's always a place to start.
Contact Kevin Woster at 394-8413 or [email protected].
August 14, 2006
http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2006/08/14/news/top/news01.txt
By Kevin Woster, Journal Staff Writer
WHITE OWL — The thin red line separating charred earth from brown grass on the hillside across from Brett Bronson's front porch shows how close he came to losing it all.
It also makes him choke up — in that strained, embarrassed way strong men battle stronger emotions — when he thinks about three days of fire, the tireless help of his neighbors and an airplane rumbling in low to paint his pasture with a ruddy strip of fire-retardant slurry that saved his home.
"The neighbors came for miles. Words can't express the generosity of the people who came here and fought that thing, some of them for 36 hours straight," Bronson said last week from the front-porch shade of his ranch house. "And had it not been for that slurry bomber, we wouldn't be standing here today."
All across the parched plains of central and western South Dakota, ranchers like Bronson are offering similar praise for firefighters who rushed by land and by air to the scene of dozens of wildfires. Seldom have so many fires flared up — often from a smoldering lightning strike on the tinder-dry prairie — in so many places at once.
And never in recent history have so many grown so large.
"We've lived with prairie fires ever since I was a kid," said state Agriculture Secretary Larry Gabriel, who ranches north of Cottonwood. "But I've never seen fires that grow in size as rapidly as they are this year."
A complex of fires burned 30,000 acres on Standing Rock Indian Reservation in Corson County recently and 30,000 more in Perkins County to the west. Last week, along with a variety of smaller blazes, crews battled fires of 2,300 acres in southwest Ziebach County east of Howes, 4,500 acres near Enning, 2,000 near Red Owl and 20,000 acres near White Owl, in southeastern Meade County.
It was the White Owl fire — a relentless rogue with a windy appetite for grass — that crept to within a few hundred feet of Bronson's place and created similar close calls for a couple of his neighbors.
The fire started Thursday, Aug. 3, and local fire crews and neighbors held it in check with limited damage that first day.
"It burned 600 acres Thursday, and that night, we had it out," Bronson said. "Then Friday morning, it took off again, and the wind came up and changed directions, and it come up behind us. It was angling right up at us, dead on for the place."
Bronson's place became the incident command headquarters. And the combination of air drops and ground crews kept the fire away from his buildings and equipment as it swept across the surrounding grassland, destroying most of the fall and winter pasture Bronson needs for his cattle herd.
"We pretty much had it out on Friday. Then on Saturday, the wind changed direction again, and away it went on south," Bronson said. "That's when it burned out the summer pasture."
All told, Bronson lost about 3,300 acres of owned and leased pasture, as well as a stack yard of hay bales that apparently, through some puzzling oversight Bronson hasn't yet figured out, wasn't covered by his insurance. He was left with less than 1,000 acres of grass and no hay to take his 175-cow herd into fall and winter.
Like his neighbors, he also faces the prospect of fixing miles of fences damaged or ruined by the fire.
"If you look straight south, there's hardly a standing fence for 10 miles," he said. "It's a mess. But at least we've got the place and the equipment, and we didn't lose anybody."
Bronson knows, too, that he's not alone in what he lost. Just over the hill to the north of Bronson along S.D. Highway 34, Bronson's neighbors escaped from similar close calls with the White Owl Fire but also lost thousands of acres of pasture.
Four days after the blaze was contained, as ranchers in pickups equipped with water tanks patrolled the charred pastures beyond her ranch home, Imogene "Gene" O'Grady sat in her air-conditioned living room and marveled at what was saved.
The land is seared gray-black on three sides of the ranch house and its outbuildings, with the black footprints of the fire nudging into the shelterbelts and edging along a grass strip that accompanies the gravel lane for a quarter-mile out to the highway.
"We're like an oasis here," O'Grady said, as her son, Tom, and great-granddaughter, Shayna, nodded agreement. "We lost quite a bit of pasture. But we're one of the lucky ones. And don't tell me we're not. It could have been so much worse."
O'Grady knows about worse. Three years ago, she lost her home to a chimney fire, a sudden, all-consuming blaze that engulfed the house in spite of the quick response and hard work of local volunteer crews.
Tom O'Grady was working construction in Gillette, Wyo., a job that helps support the family's quarter-horse operation, when the fire exploded Saturday. And Gene O'Grady spent most of the day in the White Owl Post Office a few miles west on Highway 34, listening to the police scanner.
At one point, she heard a frightening report.
"They said on the scanner that there's fire at the Gene O'Grady house. And I said, 'Oh, no, not again,'" O'Grady said. "But then Dean Wink (a neighbor) came on the scanner and said, 'I'm at the O'Grady place. And it's not burning.'"
It turned out the initial report was about an abandoned ranch house nearby.
All of the O'Grady's quarter horses survived the fire, as did the 10 long-horned Corriente cattle in a pasture nearby. The cattle refused to leave a small waterhole that eventually was surrounded by the fire.
The animals survived with some help from above.
"They got down in there around that water and wouldn't leave, so they slurried them," Tom O'Grady said.
"They've got red all over. They looked like heck, but it saved them," Gene added.
Painted cows and burned pastures were a price she was more than willing to pay.
"We're just so lucky. It's a miracle that no one got hurt," she said.
Across the road to the west from O'Grady's, Brad Austin strolled across the blackened prairie a few yards from the ranch house where his 42-year-old brother, Barry, lived before a fatal car accident near Belle Fourche in May.
Brad Austin said his brother's death kept the losses from the fire in proper perspective. But added to drought-related water shortages and the ongoing and expensive necessity to haul water to livestock in pastures where dams are dry or undrinkable, the blaze also made it even more difficult to keep a positive outlook, Austin said.
Still, that's the only way to survive, he said.
"We started out losing my brother, then the drought and the water problems came along, and now the fire," he said. "My dad always told me you got to be optimistic in this business or you won't make it. And we're fortunate that we didn't lose a home or a life."
Austin lives on the south side of Highway 34, across from his parents' home and west from brother's place. The area was at the center of more fire-fighting activity last week, as the fire scorched the earth on three sides of Barry Austin's place.
"They had the traffic stopped on the highway and the slurry bombers and helicopters were overhead. And I don't know how many trucks were out here," Brad Austin said. "There's cattle mixed up all over. The cost of fencing is what's astounding, and the loss of grass. Hopefully, it'll grow back."
Hope is harder to come by these days in the blackened aftermath of a fire that will be remembered for generations. Like other ranchers scarred by this fiery summer, Brett Bronson is trying to figure out how much of his herd he can afford to keep.
In a land where margins are always thin, the fire and the drought leave little room for errors in calculation.
With the hay and much of the grass gone and his three wells fading in the drought, Bronson knows he'll have to sell his calves early. And a fair number of cows — a carefully tended production herd with a genetic mix he likes — could go soon after that.
"I hate to take a lifetime of genetics and get rid of them, but I'm not sure we've got a lot of options," Bronson said. "It pretty well cleaned us out for feed. But we do have the house and the barn. We saved the equipment. And the cattle are still alive."
And if his financial future seems even hazier than before, Bronson can still count the blessings that remain and give thanks to the crews — close friends and complete strangers alike — who helped save them.
"I just choke up when I think about what everybody did," he said. "Because of them, we're still here."
And in a land where optimism is as essential as rain, that's always a place to start.
Contact Kevin Woster at 394-8413 or [email protected].
August 14, 2006
http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2006/08/14/news/top/news01.txt