PERRYSVILLE – A group of friends and farmers from Ashland County are set to travel to Montana next month to help out some of their own.
A group called the “Ohio Relief Haulers” have made it their mission to help those devastated by wildfires in 2017. Earlier this year, a 60-truck convoy traveled to Kansas when more than 800,000 acres were torched by flames in a matter of days. Now, they’ve set their sights on the state of Montana.
According to the National Wildlife Coordinating Group, there are currently 25 active wildfires in the state of Montana, affecting thousands of acres of land. Just this week, a lightning strike ignited a fire in Montana’s Kootenai National Forest, quickly growing to 1,400 acres by the next afternoon.
Many of the lands affected by wildfires are farmers and ranchers now struggling to feed their livestock and families. That’s where Ohio Relief Haulers comes into the picture.
“They mostly bring hay donations; since all the fields got burnt they can’t cut their own, so in order to keep their livestock fed,” said Lindsay Tackett, whose boyfriend Levi Foss of Perrysville is a member of the Ohio Relief Haulers group.
According to Tackett, Foss has been a part of Ohio Relief Haulers for a couple years. The group monitors wildfires and other natural disasters on social media, and connects with people who need the most help, sending more than 100 truckloads of hay, fencing, feed and crews to rebuild fences in the past few months alone.
“This is what America is all about … helping our fellow famers, ranchers and neighbors,” the group stated on Facebook. “None of us knew who we were helping … but they are our fellow men, and we couldn’t sit back and watch them struggle and ache.”
Tackett recently created a GoFundMe page to help pay for fuel costs to the Ohio Relief Haulers for their upcoming Montana trip. So far, the page has raised $270 of their $15,000 goal.
“Everybody that drives out are volunteers and take their personal trucks,” Tackett explained. “A lot of people can’t go this time because they’ve already gone a couple times, and at $1,000 for fuel costs, that’s a lot of money for those guys to take the time and effort to get out there.
“We figured if we could get some fuel donations more people would be able to go, and more supplies would end up in Montana.”
The goal is to send 12 trucks out to Sand Springs, Montana, roughly 1,500 miles one-way and a 23-hour drive. The trucks would haul locally donated hay and other supplies for farmers and ranchers whose property has been destroyed by wildfires.
“What happened in Kansas I guess a big group went out and dropped off a supplies at a central location, but the farm they went to, they couldn’t even drive to pick up their stuff,” Tackett said. “So they drove it out to the rancher. He said he was going to have to sell his land to stay, because his house got destroyed and he lost half his cattle.”
The goal of the Ohio Relief Haulers is to travel to Montana on Sept. 7.
“He’s really good at building relationships, the farmers he met in Kansas he talks to every day,” Tackett said of Foss. “He has the means and the funds and we don’t deal with stuff like that, so we can help these people. You see the suffering of people, and a lot of times it’s farmers helping farmers.”
