Owensboro Fire Department Chief Steve Mitchell asked City Commissioners to consider proposing an ordinance that would ban the use of sky lanterns in City limits. These floating lanterns are often used during memorial services and other tributes, but according to Mitchell, they are also a fire hazard.
As Mitchell nears the end of his tenure as the City’s fire chief, he said he wanted to do one last thing to make the City a little safer.
“They come in various sizes — they can come as large as what takes two or three people to hold, or as small as you can hold it in your hand and there’s various sizes in between,” he said. “Basically, they’re unmanned, uncontrolled flaming devices that fly through the air, and you have no control where they go or where they’ll land.”
In 2015, The National Fire Protection Association conducted research on these sky lanterns, finding them to be a major fire hazard.
“We actually had them a couple times at events here in town, didn’t know that much about them, so we allowed them, and I haven’t allowed them since,” Mitchell said. “They cause fires and they’re a pollution hazard.”
The sky lanterns can travel as far as two miles away, and they don’t biodegrade, Mitchell added.
The NFPA banned sky lanterns, claiming they proposed major fire hazards, but Owensboro residents have still continued to light them for certain events. That’s because the state of Kentucky hasn’t banned them due to fire codes that haven’t been updated to meet the national fire code standards. Cities across Kentucky have banned them at local levels, Mitchell said.
“We get about half a dozen requests from groups wanting to use these, and most of them come from downtown,” he said. “Can you imagine a lot of these lighting off from Smothers Park and landing on these buildings in the downtown area, still flaming?”
Mitchell and Public Events Director Tim Ross teamed up to ask commissioners to ban these lanterns through an official ordinance. Mayor Tom Watson proposed the idea of a joint ordinance with the County so that sky lanterns would be banned across the entire county.
Mitchell said he hadn’t discussed it with the County yet, but that he would discuss the idea of a City/County ordinance with the Daviess County Fire Department and County Attorney Claud Porter.
Mitchell added that while structure fires have been a major concern for OFD, statistics show that field and tower fires have also been an ongoing issue with the use of sky lanterns.
