Hope all of you south-central Kansas folks are safe. My Kansas relatives say it's a disaster.
It's a biggy. Lots of folks are losing pasture, animals and materials. Night before last the north wind was so full of the smell, people were calling the fire department...and we're 200 miles south of the fires. Not much about it on the news...I guess it's not as newsworthy as Cruz calling Trump's wife a ho.
Lots of Easter goings-on cancelled in Medicine Lodge. Churches are providing services for firefighters. My daughter-in-law says fire is 65% contained as of this morning. A news report said that 45% of Barber County has burned.
Wow. That would be a 25 X 25 mile square.
lmbrls, post: 364158, member: 6823 wrote: Wow. That would be a 25 X 25 mile square.
Here's where it was at 24 hours ago.
It's past Medicine Lodge now. Town was under voluntary evacuation yesterday and may still be. Smoke and burned grass are falling near Wichita, about 90 miles from Medicine Lodge.
News is hard to get. My daughter-in-law said at 2:19 Central Time that they're back to 15% contained. And, as you said, Paden, lots of dead cows and nothing to graze on for the survivors.
http://www.kake.com/home/headlines/SLIDESHOW-Comanche-County-grass-fire-373276221.html
Might be better data here showing the smoke plume, but I cannot get it to work with my browser.
From Medicine Lodge to Coldwater is about 40 miles on Highway 160. There are fewer than a dozen mailboxes along the highway serving homes miles away to the north or south. Wide-open cattle range country for the most part with a scattering of oil wells atop the highest hills in the Gypsum Hills area. A sea of red dirt for the most part.
A close friend from my high school days taught school for a couple decades in Medicine Lodge. Nearly all their buses are short buses. They also use vans and Suburbans in some cases. They have about twice as many bus drivers as a similarly-sized school district in my part of the state. It takes so long to access some of the rural homes that there isn't time enough to load full size buses.
Holy Cow, post: 364210, member: 50 wrote: From Medicine Lodge to Coldwater is about 40 miles on Highway 160. There are fewer than a dozen mailboxes along the highway serving homes miles away to the north or south....
That is some lonely country up there. My father's family (they're all gone) was strung from the Freedom/ Alva, OK area up through Protection, KS. A man can collect his thoughts up there...you can also walk a good long ways if you run out of gas.
Hopefully the few volunteer fire departments spattered around have some help from other areas. I don't think most people understand EVERYWHERE up there is an hour away from anything else.
Hopefully there's some rain in the forecast.
Paden,
The very first time I ever ate shrimp was at a little diner in beautiful downtown Protection, Kansas. Can't get much further from shrimp growing country than that. We had a neighbor who originated in Freedom. He was a tad bit different. He had a wife and a live-in girlfriend. His son wanted to date my sister but my parents didn't approve for some reason.
Good ol' Protection...where time not only stood still...it actually backed up a little..;-)
Seriously, I have no idea why anybody felt it was the place to be back then, but they did. Here's a link to my Great Grandfather's obit:
@paden
Turns out that the name Peter Wuchter is fairly uncommon in US genealogical records so you can track his information fairly easily.
One excellent source is: http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?surname=wuchter&given=peter&start=21
The first entry on that page (#21 actually) lists all sorts of people you know. Some of the other entries from #17 to #22 are related but #21 is the most complete.
Another excellent source is: https://familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=20&query=%2Bgivenname%3Apeter~%20%2Bsurname%3Awuchter~%20%2Bbirth_year%3A1833-1835~
This has info for the 1880 and 1900 census records plus info on his burial site and others buried nearby.
As you know, Comanche County has not turned out to be a metropolitan area with only 1891 residents in the entire county in 2010. https://www.kshs.org/geog/geog_counties/view/county:CM
Another source revealed that the Presbyterian Church in Coldwater was founded in 1884 and the Methodist Church in 1885 so the place was just getting off to a decent start when Peter arrived in the area in 1885.
Holy Cow, post: 364381, member: 50 wrote: ..Another source revealed that the Presbyterian Church in Coldwater was founded in 1884 and the Methodist Church in 1885 so the place was just getting off to a decent start when Peter arrived in the area in 1885.
Must've been a bustling metropolis to have two churches. 😉
Actually that's a bad jab. There are hundreds of communities spattered across the lonely prairie with a population of 400 and six or seven churches in town. A testament to our faith I suppose.
Thanks for the links. I need to look at those when I get a chance.
Here's a video of part of the Kansas fire. Listen to that wind!
[MEDIA=youtube]XPo2FzVMqzw[/MEDIA]
[USER=20]@paden cash[/USER]
Things are waaaaay too hot in Freedom now.
Holy Cow, post: 366031, member: 50 wrote: [USER=20]@paden cash[/USER]
Things are waaaaay too hot in Freedom now.
yes, indeedie-doo. From what I've been able to glean from the news reports up until today there have been far more hay bale casualties than actual structures (or homes). The latest report from the joint local FD/ Oklahoma Forestry Services (handling the press releases) reports that "homes" have been destroyed since yesterday. That is not a good thing. Even though the area is what most would consider "sparsely populated", they're still folks..and folks hurt when they loose their homes, livelihood and grubstake. I hope they're able to get a lid on it before the next big wind maker.
