Fire Season

The Parker County Commis-sioners Court on March 14 instituted a 60-day burn ban in all unincorporated parts of the county in response to an elevated danger of wildfires.

Local fire departments have been busy not only with their own territories but also in mutual aid situations.

Parker County Emergency Services District No. 1 Fire Chief Steve Watson said the department has been on numerous mutual aid calls, and has helped on fires in Tarrant and Wise Counties as well.

“It’s been busy,” Watson said. “It’s very weather-dependent, which is usually the case in the winter fire season.”

Watson pointed out that we are in a LaNiña weather pattern, which tends to have warm, dry, and sometimes windy winter days with cold snaps in between. Watson looked back at 2018, 2011, 2009, and 2005-06 as years that had a similar weather pattern and bad fire seasons.

“When all the grass and brush and stuff like that is in its dormant season, it responds very fast to humidity changes,” Watson said.He explained that prairie land and grass is classified as a one-hour fuel, which means it responds within one hour to humidity changes. 

“That’s why it can snow on it one day and then a warm dry front moves in, and you can have a fire the next day.”

Overall, the ESD has been on about 1,400 calls since Jan. 1. About 100 of those have been grass fires, including large fires the department has assisted with in Tarrant and Wise Counties.

A fire in Wise County consumed 250 acres, and another recent fire took 50 acres.

While some fires are started by things like backyard smokers, “the most common things we see are welding and people who burned trash or brush or lawn clippings and thought that it was good. But then some really low humidity weather came along and wind blows that stuff out,” Watson said. “Every once in a while there’s some fluke thing, like a squirrel that got caught in a transformer, fell to the ground, and started a fire.

Watson said he has seen fires started from embers that were there two to three days after brush was burned.

With the weather dry and wind blowing, residents are urged to be careful with anything that can make a spark.