Instructor: Chad Baumgarten

In this presentation I describe the Windy Fire that we had on 1/14/2021. This fire started on the afternoon of January 14 2021 5 miles north of the south Dakota North Dakota boarder in Adams Co. North Dakota it burned into South Dakota 4 miles west of Lemmon South Dakota and traveled 18 miles into South Dakota before we were able to stop forward progress. Weather was a main cause of fire spread. We had gust up to 65mph at time the fire was reported. The type of land that the fire ran through made it tough to flake the fire. Fuels ranged from farm fields to range land to wooded draws and shelter belts to abandoned farm steads. The speed of the fire made it impossible to get into a safe location in front of it with heavy equipment to make fire breaks because it was moving faster than farm equipment and road graders could drive. From the time it started to when the main head of the fire stopped at the Grand River it traveled about 18 miles in 2 hours. Once we were able to understand the path of the fire we could put resources where they needed to be to stop forward progress and start flaking the fire. In this part of the country, it can take an hour to get most of our mutual aid departments on scene.