By COLE REIF
Great Bend Post
Staffing and weather. Great Bend Public Works Director Jason Cauley said those are the two biggest challenges the city faces when trying to burn the tree debris at the compost site. The Great Bend City Council took a step to alleviate some of those challenges Monday when they approved the purchase of an air burner firebox for $165,366.
Since the inception of the compost site, the city has burned tree debris in a berm area. Cauley said the right wind conditions are needed to burn and a busy staff must watch the fire 24 hours while the fire is burning.
"With summer coming on, our crew does mosquito fogging as well," said Cauley. "If you do a burn, you're applying that much burden on them for the extra overtime. When we mosquito fog, we do it from 8 p.m. to midnight. You're looking at crew that's putting in a lot of overtime during the summer if we're able to burn."
The air burner is an enclosed steel box that is over 24 feet long and seven feet wide. The equipment has an air curtain that traps smoke and increases the interior temperature to approximately 1,800 degrees.
Depending on the wind direction, the city can become inundated with the smell of smoke with the current burns. With the air burner, once it is up to temperature, there is no smoke.
The system can burn approximately three to four tons of material an hour. Cauley said staff will be able to burn during the day and within two hours of the end of the day, begin the process of snuffing the fire. This will eliminate the overtime hours of needing staff to stand by and also reduce stockpiling.
"If our area is fully loaded with tree debris, by my approximations, it would take about 70 hours to burn the full area," said Cauley. "With this burner able to do it on a regular basis, it should help us keep our stockpile low for emergency situations like we had in 2023."
Cauley expected Air Burners Inc. to ship the air burner within six weeks after the system is built.