FAIRBURY, Neb. - The Fairbury Rural Fire Department responded to three separate calls in the span of a couple of hours on Thursday afternoon. The issues included a field fire, a car fire and a yard fire, and no one was harmed in any of them.  

If three calls in one afternoon for one small-town fire department to handle sounds like a lot, that’s because it is: fire chief Judd Stewart says his team averages about one response per week. 

“Given the fall we’ve had, it’s kind of an explosive environment for fires,” Stewart said. “If anything would start, it’s going to spread very rapidly and be hard to control.” 

Thursday’s first call came in just before 1 o’clock, to a field just south of Fairbury near the intersection of Highways 15 and 708. Static electricity from a combine sparked into a fire in a soybean field that had already been harvested – that meant that even though the fire spread through an area of about five acres, there was no long-lasting damage. From start to finish, it took the crew about 30 minutes to fully nullify the fire. 

“We were fortunate. The winds, as strong as they are, they were in the perfect direction for the fire we had,” Stewart said. “We were about a quarter mile from it getting to a bunch of hay bales and to an open grass field – if it hits that, we would have had a much higher rate of spread, and a much more difficult time putting the fire out.” 

Just after returning to the station from the field fire, the department received its second call of the afternoon, around 2:45. This time, it was for a car fire a few miles north of Fairbury. The driver noticed something wrong and pulled off to the side of the road, where something under the hood combusted. The fire spread to the nearby ditch, but the response team quickly contained the initial grass fire and cooled off the car before the fire engine could get on scene and extinguish the car. No injuries were reported at the scene.  

And while that was going on, the third call was a yard fire on Maple Street, stemming from a citizen grinding metal in their garage. They were able to put out the fire in their yard themselves after calling 911, as the response team was arriving. 

Especially with the weather conditions the way they have been lately, caution is critical, especially because fires, if they do spark, can quickly swell and get out of control.  

“When you have high wind days like this, the fires don’t get very wide but they can travel a lot of distance,” Stewart said. “Our [first] fire was really only about 50 yards wide, but it had moved about three quarters of a mile, in less than half an hour. They’ll move rapidly on days like this.”