Enforcing fire pit inspection

Pine Haven Fire Chief Don Lancaster advised council at last Tuesday’s meeting that he plans to begin actively inspecting all residential fire pits within town limits.

“We have a lot of fire pits in town where people are burning wood and a lot of them probably haven’t been inspected in a long time; some of them maybe never,” he said.

“I have a real concern with that issue because we have fuel and everything else around town if anything escapes one of those fire pits because there isn’t enough clearance around it, we’re going to have quite a fire on our hands.”

Last year, according to Treasurer Barb Hardy, the procedure for inspections had been revised by former fire chief Bob Rudichar to allow previously permitted pits to be re-permitted without examination. “Bob said that if it was inspected once and was in the right place, it didn’t need to be inspected the next year,” she said.

Public Works Director and volunteer fireman Sunny Schell opined, “I think we need to do something [so that] when they renew their burn permit, we, as the fire department, go and inspect that and make sure they don’t have three inches of pine needles around their fire pit.”

She added that already this year, she has had to remind a number of residents who were using their pits of their obligation to renew their permit lending to the potential problem.

Lancaster is concerned that a few of the pits have never been permitted, thus have never been inspected, and he and his department have been teaching the community to be “fire wise” for the last couple of years, an endeavor started under the auspices of Rudichar. “We have to take steps to get people’s minds set on that,” commented Lancaster.

Mayor Pro-Tem John Cook advised Ordinance review overseer Chris Bingham to bring before the governing body a revised ordinance to ensure the municipal law will back the new procedure before implementation.

The chief has three designated members of his crew to facilitate these inspections with the change of ordinance.

Schell commended the Pine Haven community overall, saying, “I’m proud of the community because everybody is taking care of their ladder fuel around their yards and cleaning up their underbrush and pine needles [and] every little bit helps.”