Please consider our fire fighters safety

Today a Minneapolis firefighter tested positive for COVID.

Today the fire hazard in Todd County was high and yesterday it was very high.

It was high as well on Sunday when, on a short drive around the country side, I spotted three piles of brush burning. One was unattended.

Forty years ago today, a fool like those brush pile burners, ignited a large chunk of land in north eastern Todd county. Those firefighters were only at risk of injury or death from fire. Today's firefighters, and first responders, have the added risk of COVID-19.

Please do all you can to keep our fire fighters at home.

Below is the story of the 1980 Philbrook fire; started by  a fool.
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By Tim King

One hundred years ago Philbrook, a village near where the Long Prairie River joins the Crow Wing, was at the heart of the effort to exploit Central Minnesota's vast stands of white pine trees.  Then the village bustled with the new wealth of the pineries.  The was a large sawmill, a brick yard, post office, and train station.  The growing town rivaled nearby Staples for industriousness.

But, by 1980 Philbrook was much as it is today.  A quiet cluster of houses.  A store.  Some nearby farms.  And the white pines were slowly growing back.  For a few days that spring eyes, from across Minnesota, turned toward the little village.  

Jeff Smith remembers riding the school bus from Staples towards home, in Philbrook, on April 21, 1980.  His mother Janice remembers the day well, also.  

"It was ninety-six degrees by noon," she says.

Things were going to get hotter.  By the end of the day one of the worst forest fire in the history of Central, Minnesota had swept through northeast Todd County.  Nearly 7,000 acres of forest and grassland, including almost every white pine tree on the Smith's 395 acre farm, lay in smoking ruins.  

"I hope to never see anything like that again," Jeff says.  "It was a crown fire."

Crown fires, Jeff learned later, are the ones that move into the tree tops and burn through with the explosive force and speed of the freight trains that roar through Philbrook. 

The state patrol stopped Jeff, and his brother Brent's, school bus a few miles from home.

"They said you can't go any further.  Philbrook is gone," Jeff remembers. 

 "The children were hysterical with fear," Janice says.   "They thought their parents were dead."

Janice had helped her husband plant oats earlier in the day and then had gone to her bowling league in Staples.  On the way home she too was stopped by the highway patrol.  She had her own fears.

"My husband Verne was notorious for driving his truck with an empty gas gauge," Janice remembers.   "I was taking oats out to him in the field and ran out of gas.  I thought maybe I  should just let him come and get the truck.   But I went and got gas and took the truck to him.   If I  hadn't he would have been stranded out there.  All the trees burned on the farm except for the ones in the farm yard.  But still, it got so hot in the farm yard the cow  pies burst into flame."

Somehow Clifford and Marion Smith, Janice's in-laws, kept the farm buildings from burning.  And Verne was able to escape the flames.  And, fortunately, the State patrol was wrong about most of Philbrook.

"I didn't get into Philbrook until six that evening," Janice says.  "The National Guard was there.  We had to find stuff for sandwiches for them."

Nearby, Verne Smith's cousin, Lawrence, lost twelve buildings, including his barn.  Flames destroyed much of Smith's machinery including a 1947 pick-up truck.  The glass head lights in the truck melted.  Glass is said to melt at 1,200 degrees.  The fire also took 300 hogs.  After the fire was over Lawrence  had to look, and listen, for the badly burned hogs the fire hadn't killed.  When he found the burned pigs he shot them.  Some had run as much as a quarter of a mile away.

There is a photograph of Lawrence, on the day after the flames, in a Staples World newspaper commemorating the fire's 20th anniversary.  When the photo was taken Lawrence, and his wife Iona, had been going steady for more than 24 hours in their battle to save their farm.  They've been partially successful.  Their house is untouched.  In the photo Lawrence, a barrel chested man in a soot smeared tee-shirt, is striding past the scorched cement block foundation of his ruined barn.  In front of him, just to the left, are the remains of a bloated and charred hog.  Another man, behind Lawrence, stares through the remains of the barn doorway.  Inside, on the floor, the twisted and blackened steel roof rests.  The man stares in what can only be awe.

The Philbrook fire caused awe.

"We heard a roar.  It sounded like a freight train," Richard Kowalski, whose house was consumed when the fire leapt across forty acres, said.

"The fire had started in three or four places along County Road 7," Staples Fire Chief Bill Goff told the Staples World.  "We got into trouble almost right away and nearly lost some men and trucks.  The fire was moving so fast it was scary."

The fire started when live coals flew out of the back of a truck hauling ashes to the land fill.  The ashes started multiple fires.  

"God saved Philbrook, Chief Goff said later.  "The fire just went around it."

At its peak there were nearly 400 firefighters from eleven fire departments and the National Guard battling two infernos - with Philbrook sandwiched between them.  But many of the battles were intense, personal, and lonely.  Mrs. Harlan Kilian, at home alone, tried starting her car to escape the blaze.  It flooded.  She ran down the driveway as the fire, sometimes moving at forty acres a minute, consumed her car and then her new home.

"It was gone in forty-five minutes," Iona Smith told the World of her farm's twelve buildings.

    "Buildings didn't burn they exploded into flame," Lawrence said.  "Fire was every where."

Living in the ashen aftermath of the fire was grueling.  Although land owners made a major effort to salvage damaged timber Janice Smith said being in the presence of the ruined forest, day in and day out, wore down Clifford Smith's, her father-in-law, spirit and health.

"It got so bad that you could go outside and hear the bugs chewing on the dead trees," Jeff remembers.

Today, although Clifford is no longer can see them, the young pine trees are again reaching for the sky on the Smith farm.  And the wounds wrought by the Philbrook fire are covered with a blanket of soft brown pine needles.