By MATT PIKE
St. Joseph Post
If your yard has been piling up with sticks and leaves, it's time to burn them up as open burning began this month in St. Joseph.
Fire Inspector Steve Hendrickson says that open burning will allow St. Joseph residents to burn any waste that has been on your property for the past months.
"You can't like if you have a commercial garden, lawn service care, or something like that, you can't go out and bring stuff to your property and burn it's only stuff that's generated on that property," Hendrickson tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post. "It needs to be in roughly the size of a 55-gallon drum, it can be made out of chicken wire anything you want to make it out of, just roughly that size."
Open burning will be allowed in St. Joseph from 8am until 6pm, as long as weather conditions are right.
Hendrickson says that with the recent rains we have had, conditions should be good to burn, but there are some weather conditions that will force burning to be banned.
"If it gets super dry to where it's a fire danger, especially on a windy day, they'll stop it just because the embers could fly and then they of course cause more problems than anything else because they fly up against somebody's fence, or their house, or their garage, or something and then we end up with a structure fire out of it," Hendrickson explains. "But those are the two main ones, high winds is the biggest one."
Open burning will be allowed in St. Joseph until April 30th.
Hendrickson says the fire department seldom runs into problems, and St. Joseph residents have been pretty good about following the rules.
"The problem comes from the people that say well it was windy and so I put it up against my fence, well your fence is a wood fence and fire and wood don't quite mix," Hendrickson says. "It's things like that, it's just people not paying attention or trying to burn tires or stuff like that when neighbors complain."
Hendrickson says that if neighbors do complain the department will come and investigate, and if they fine anyone breaking rules will issue a ticket.