By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
Fire officials in St. Joseph have seen a growing number of fires, just in the first four months of the new year.
From January to the end of March the St. Joseph Fire Department saw 62 fires in different parts of the city.
Fire Inspector Steve Henrichson says the number of fires has gone up in April, with the department seeing different types of fires.
"There's the intentional ones and there's plenty of them that were unintentional," Henrichson tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post. "As of this morning we're at 75 this year for building fires."
Henrichson says a number of the fires the department saw from January through March, were set intentionally.
"11 out of the 62 fires this year were definitely, intentionally set," Henrichson explains. "We have a lot more fires this year but, some of them are still under investigation so those could go either way."
Henrichson says at least 17 of the fires were set unintentionally.
As April comes to an end, St. Joseph residents may have not gotten a chance to burn their yard waste after Open Burning was forced to cancel numerous times.
Henrichson says most of the canceled open burning days were due to high winds in the city.
"That was the fear of it spreading was because of the wind, I mean you get an ember, we've had embers travel half a block before, especially on a house fire," Henrichson says. "When we get some of them going, we can watch the embers travel half a block or more with the airwaves, so we wanted to be sure with the high winds you definitely don't want weeds and things like that floating around burning."
Henrichson says as of right now there have been no discussions to extend open burning due to the number of canceled days.
Open Burning ends in St. Joseph April 30th.