Unusually dry, warm and windy conditions have sparked a number of wildfires in forest preserves and prairies throughout the Chicago area and the threat of additional fires will continue until the area is dampened with significant rainfall, forest preserve and fire officials said Monday.
The absence of significant amounts of rain, along with high winds and an abundance of leaves on the ground, have contributed to about 30 blazes within Cook County’s forest preserves since the beginning of October, according to Richard Newhard, chief forester for the Cook County Forest Preserve District. Fourteen of the fires have occurred since Thursday, he added.
“Fall is a peak time for wildfires, but this fall seems to be unusually bad,” Newhard said. “The good news is that, so far, there has been no damage to homes and businesses adjacent to the preserves that have experienced fires and no one has been hurt.”
On Monday, firefighters were in their third day of battling a stubborn brush fire in more than 100 acres of forest preserve in Will County’s Thorn Creek Nature Preserve near far south suburban Steger.
The blaze, the first wildfire in a Will County forest preserve in 10 years, according to forest preserve spokesman Bruce Hodgdon, began on the north side of the preserve between Park Forest and University Park about 11 a.m. Saturday. It was brought under control late Sunday, but rekindled it about 8:30 a.m. Monday.
“You get one fire down and another starts in a different spot,” said Ron Welch, Park Forest fire administrator. “The problem is that the ground is so dry and full of leaves, it’s hard to contain these (fire) breakouts. We need rain, and lots of it.”
According to the National Weather Service, the Chicago area receives an average of 2.25 inches of rain in October. This year, however, less than an inch fell during the month. Meanwhile, the winds on average have been blowing between 15- and 20-m.p.h. Daytime temperatures have been hovering in the 60s and 70s, about 20 degrees above normal.
“It’s a mixture of all the wrong ingredients,” said an exhausted Capt. Bruce Ziegle of the Park Forest Fire Department, who, as of Monday, spent 72 hours fighting the stubborn Thorn Creek blaze, along with other firemen from Park Forest, Steger, Peotone and Crete.
Because Thorn Creek is an interwoven thicket of tree limbs and vines without utility roads or even bike paths, fire trucks were unable to get water to the blaze, Ziegle said. As a result, firefighters, clad in water vests holding several gallons of water, hiked about a half mile into the woods and hand pumped the water out of the vests.
“People waded ankle and knee deep through underbrush up to the fire line,” Ziegle said. “After pumping it out, they had to hike another half mile out for more water and then back in.”
At one point Saturday night, fire crews climbed to the roof of a University Park senior citizens building to spray water onto nearby flames, Ziegle said.
Conditions were complicated by winds that carried embers to other parts of the preserve. That’s how flames rekindled Monday, Ziegle said. Because of the flying embers, fire officials were urging area residents Monday afternoon to remove leaves from their yards.
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“You never know where the embers will blow next,” Ziegle said.
In addition, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and the Cook County Forest Preserve District have issued advisories urging residents to use extreme caution with campfires and smoking materials in forested areas.
Dick Little, IDNR forestry division manager, said Monday that the threat of wildfires throughout the state is the worst since 1984.
“With the weather as dry as it is and the layers of highly flammable leaves and tree limbs on the ground this time of the year, all it takes is for a cigarette to be tossed in tall grass and, in no time, you have a fire,” Little said.
Although wildfires have occurred throughout Cook County’s 67,000 acres of forest, most have been concentrated in southern Cook, Newhard said.
There were three major brush fires in the Palos Preserve near Hickory Hills on Thursday. On Friday, fires broke out in County Lane Woods at 95th Street and La Grange Road near Palos Hills and another in the Plum Creek Preserve in the far southeast corner of the county. The latter fire consumed about 10 acres, Newhard said.
Also Friday, small brush fires broke out in the Beaubien Woods Preserve on Chicago’s far Southeast Side and in and adjacent to the Wampum Lake Woods at Illinois Highway 394 and Thornton-Lansing Road.
In addition to the Thorn Creek blaze, there were reports of brush fires on Monday in the Kickapoo Woods in southeast Cook County and at 93rd Street and Kean Avenue near Hickory Hills.
So far, no wildfires have occurred in forest preserves in DuPage or Lake Counties, officials in those counties said.
“We’ve been lucky, so far,” said Lake County Forest Preserve District Supt. Mike Tully.
Although wildfires can threaten residential areas and businesses in their path and leave firefighters who battle them exhausted, they do provide at least one benefit, Newhard said.
“They clear out a lot of undesirable vegetation and debris, thus providing a lot of ecological benefits in the long run,” he said. “That’s not much consolation, however, for the firefighters who spend hours, if not days, battling these blazes.”