(Harlan) The Shelby County Emergency Management Office is working with the Shelby County Board of Supervisors on establishing a new process for putting a burn ban in place.
Emergency Management Director Alex Londo says they need to get some things updated in regards to the procedure. “Back in 2016 the county put in an ordinance on the processes of putting in a county wide burn ban. We are just looking at updating that to fit was Iowa Code has on Code Section 100.40 about the State Fire Marshal issuing a burn ban. We are just meeting with the Supervisors and seeing what that process would look like to update that county ordinance.”
Londo says they use the National Weather Service and local input as a guide for burn bans. “You can Google the Iowa Fire Danger Rating Index and the National Weather Service puts a category whether you are in low, moderate, high, very high, or extreme and you can see where your county is. Then we poll our Chiefs and if the majority of the Chiefs agree to go into a burn ban then that’s what we do.”
Londo says they’ll be working with the Supervisors over the next couple of months to make sure they take all the proper legal steps to update and simplify the ordinance.
