A young volunteer firefighter was arrested Friday in connection with a wildfire that destroyed around 700 acres of a 2,600-acre nature preserve in northwest Illinois. He has been charged with one count of arson.
On Friday morning, the Lee County sheriff’s office was notified of a large fire in the Green River State Wildlife Area after witnesses saw a person coming out of a vehicle and setting some patches of grass ablaze. The bystanders stopped the man and detained him until county deputies arrived, according to officials.
Trent W. Schafer, 21, of Kasbeer — a small, rural, unincorporated community — was taken into custody at the scene. According to police, there are additional counts of arson pending against Schafer for several other fires previously set in Lee and Bureau counties. A class 2 felony, arson is punishable by three to seven years in prison. Police said Schafer is a volunteer firefighter with the fire department of Ohio, Illinois, a small village some 60 miles southwest of the city of Rockford.
As the fire, which began around 11 a.m., quickly grew to a five-alarm level because of dry, warm and windy weather, so did the multi-agency effort to contain it. At least 10 local rural fire departments, including the one where Schafer volunteered, responded alongside the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, which manages the land and has crews that specialize in wildfires.
After burning for almost four hours, the flames were finally under control by 3:45 p.m., though crews kept working until after 5 p.m., according to officials.
Earlier in the day, the National Weather Service had issued an alert for an elevated threat of brush and grass fires because of the combination of warm temperatures in the low to mid-60s, low humidity and wind gusts of up to 35 miles per hour.
According to the IDNR’s website, the management area, with its flat landscape and gently rolling hills, is popular among hunters, hikers, birders and other outdoor enthusiasts. Almost a third of its 2,600 acres are swampy, with the rest dedicated to prairie restoration, open fields, cultivated areas and timberlands.
“The wetland-prairie continuum found at the site is the largest and best remaining example of a nearly million-acre habitat mosaic that once covered the Green River lowlands,” an agency flyer from the early 2000s reads.
The Green River flows for almost 90 miles from Lee County to the Rock River, which it joins near the Quad Cities to feed into the Mississippi.
