Two solid days of gusty but dry winds tortured firefighters early Friday as they battled grass fires throughout west central Nebraska.
The southernmost one forced the nearly 1,000 residents of Benkelman, the Dundy County seat, to evacuate for several hours overnight.
Emergency officials lifted Benkelman’s evacuation order just before 7:15 a.m. MT Friday, after firefighters from 13 departments across three states barely stopped the blaze from penetrating the town, which is near both Colorado and Kansas.
Their counterparts farther north and east grappled with two separate grass fires near Brady — one northeast of town, along the Lincoln County-Custer County line, and another near Jeffrey Lake to the south.
Northwest winds set off by a cold front Wednesday evening were still blasting the region Friday afternoon, said Sam Meltzer, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office at Lee Bird Field.
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“That front made it through the region, (but) now it’s just a continuous flow of cold air plunging down from the northwest,” Meltzer said Friday afternoon.
With the lack of moisture accompanying Wednesday’s cold front, the consistently powerful winds created “a good environment for some grass fires to pop up,” he added.
The high wind warning issued Wednesday evening was scheduled to expire about 6 p.m. Friday, the weather service said.
Winds are expected to remain noticeable this weekend, but top gusts weren’t likely to exceed 35 mph Saturday and 25 mph Sunday.
The region’s top gusts over the 48-hour blow were 75 mph about 10 p.m. Wednesday in rural Cherry County and 71 mph at Valentine’s Miller Field airport.
Between midnight and 9 a.m. CT Friday, the weather service recorded top gusts of 58 mph at the North Platte airport, 69 mph at the Broken Bow airport and 70 mph just east of Imperial.
That last gust, recorded at 2:14 a.m. MT a mile east of Imperial, indicates what firefighters farther south at Benkelman had to contend with.
“This was our fourth fire in the last three days,” said Relgene Zimbelman, Benkelman’s volunteer fire chief. “My firemen are getting really, really tired.”
The latest fire likely was stirred up after midnight from the embers of one two weeks ago, which had its roots in a controlled burn about a half-dozen miles northwest of town, he said.
Authorities began warning residents after 3 a.m. to get out of the way of a grass fire that started about four miles northwest of the city and was moving quickly toward town.
The McCook Gazette said emergency shelters were set up at the American Legion Hall in Haigler, 20 miles west of Benkelman, and the Veterans Memorial Hall in Stratton, about the same distance east.
Janice Hester, administrator of Benkelman’s Sarah Ann Hester Memorial Home, evacuated the nursing home’s 18 residents.
Dann Nelms, who lives south of Dundy County Hospital, said he woke up about 2:15 a.m. MT Friday “and could smell the smoke.”
He woke his wife and son, but the family didn’t evacuate because the fire didn’t appear to be heading their direction.
They instead watched the fire from their home, using a house to the north to gauge whether they needed to leave, Nelms said.
At one point, 80 firefighters and 40 trucks were in the field, trying to stop the fire that nearly blew right past them.
“It traveled 6 miles in two hours,” Zimbelman said. “The smoke was so thick coming through Benkelman you couldn’t hardly see anything.”
The fast-moving fire had burned some 1,000 to 1,200 acres as it approached the Circle B Motor Lodge and Skyline Grill on the northwest side of U.S. Highway 34-Nebraska Highway 61, said Region 51 Emergency Management Director Brandon Myers.
That’s where the multiple units of firefighters stopped the fire about 7 a.m. from crossing the highway and reaching Benkelman’s tree-lined residential areas.
Though no one was hurt and no homes or businesses burned, the fire took a storage shed and plenty of fenceposts on its way to town, Zimbelman said.
There were no students at Dundy County-Stratton Junior-Senior High School, where Superintendent Rick Haney had called off classes for the day about 3 a.m.
He and his staff later opened the cafeteria and its refrigerators to the firefighters, serving dozens of them breakfast after their long night.
That’s what his community does best, Haney said. “Anytime you have what we would classify as something of a need, or a good, old-fashioned barn-raising, it’s an opportunity for people to pull together.”
Nelms said he was grateful for all the mutual aid Benkelman’s firefighters received in stopping the fire from reaching the hospital and the residences beyond.
It “wouldn’t have got done without fire departments’ help from around the area,” he said. The blaze got “too big, too fast.”
About the time authorities were warning Benkelman residents to evacuate, firefighters from Lincoln, Custer and Dawson counties were being called to the wildfire northeast of Brady and about 10 miles south of Arnold.
It started about 1:30 a.m. CT Friday, burning about one square mile before being contained. Myers said some were saying the blaze was caused by a power line spark.
As with the Benkelman fire, no injuries or structural damage was reported. Firefighters likewise contained the separate wildfire Friday morning near Jeffrey Lake, about six miles southwest of Brady.
Telegraph staff writers Tim Johnson and Joan von Kampen, the McCook Gazette and the Lincoln Journal Star contributed to this report.
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