By Craig Volland, Sierra Club Kansas Chapter, Air Quality Chair
In 2010 the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) created a Smoke Management Plan (SMP) to address growing concerns in urban areas about heavy smoke from early spring burns in the Flint Hills.
This Plan significantly reduced exceedances of the national air quality standards in metropolitan Kansas City, but did not diminish frequent exceedances in Wichita and Topeka, northern Oklahoma , and Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska.
In our June 2024 Waypoints, we reported on alarmingly high PM2.5 fine particulate and ozone levels measured by official monitors in the Wichita metropolitan area on April 5, 2024, along with several other exceedances on subsequent days. As soon as these data were verified, we asked the head of KDHE’s Bureau of Air to take corrective action to prevent future such events.
In response, since November 2024, KDHE has convened monthly meetings of stakeholders at the Konza Prairie Biological Station near Manhattan, Kansas to discuss changes to the 2010 SMP. Participants include the Sierra Club Kansas Chapter, local public health agencies, county fire departments, the Environmental Protection Agency, Flint Hills ranchers, and livestock interests began in November. I have attended these meetings with Gerry Snyder from the Sierra Club Flint Hills Group.
After three meetings significant points of contention have become evident.
Smoke Model. The 2010 SMP called for KDHE to create a convenient means to notify Flint Hills landowners when suitable weather conditions would permit initiation of their burns. KDHE hired a contractor to produce a Smoke Model that would predict weather conditions and transport wind directions for the next day. But since adherence to the SMP is voluntary, there is no accurate information on the extent to which landowners and their burn contractors actually consult the Model. Furthermore, the Model fails to address the risk of an atmospheric inversion that limits vertical dispersion of smoke. A low “mixing height” contributed to the alarmingly high pollutant levels on April 5, 2024.
Spring Burn Conditions. There is consensus that early spring, with its high winds and frequent rains, has a limited number of days that are ideal for burning. Because there are so few days of good weather, when conditions improve, many landowners jump in at the same time, thus increasing the volume of smoke.
“Big Burn Days” typically occur three or four times in a season. To its credit, KDHE has been urging ranchers to burn in the late summer and fall which has certain advantages in improving the quality of grasses for their cattle. At the November 2024 meeting KDHE asked Kansas State University researcher and rancher K. C. Olson to present on the advantages of this practice. The number of acres burned off-season has been increasing but it remains a small percentage of the two million acres burned each year on average.
Notifying the Public. The general public is most at risk during the Big Burn Days but KDHE acknowledges that it's difficult to predict those occurrences and they are reluctant to raise the alarm when a big burn may not actually happen. We learned that most landowners do contact their county fire agencies for burn safety permissions prior to their burn decision. However, KDHE has no system to collect this information efficiently in advance. We urged the agency to study that possibility.
Gaps in KDHE Air Quality Monitoring. At present there is no regulatory monitor for fine particulates and ozone between Topeka and the Cedar Bluff “background” monitor just east of Hays. This means that dangerous levels of smoke moving north into the Manhattan and Junction City are not measured. Sierra Club has complained about this gap in air quality monitoring for the past 10 years, to no avail.
Burn Impacts on Wildlife. Early research found that massive spring burns were reducing the population of the iconic Greater Prairie Chicken in the Flint Hills. The 2010 SMP called on KDHE to conduct more research on Patch Burns, a plan to have a few ranchers burn a third of their grasslands every year instead of all of it every year. This technique greatly reduces the smoke output and also helps the prairie chickens avoid the fires. We brought this up at he January 2025 meeting, but it was unclear if KDHE has complied with the SMP requirement.
Sierra Club Takes Action. This year Sierra Club will institute its own monitoring project, thanks to a generous equipment donation. Gerry Snyder is placing Purple Air fine particulate monitors at several sites in the Manhattan area. These will connect to a website that can show real time fine particle levels during the upcoming burn season.
It’s hard to predict how KDHE’s review of the Flint Hills Smoke Management Plan will turn out, but we will keep you up to date on the developments.