When Katie Shaw woke up on March 6, she thought the toughest part of her day would be caring for her small daughter, who had just undergone a tonsillectomy.

That was before she noticed the billowing smoke to the south of her ranch home near Ashland — the beginning of the massive Starbuck Fire that would burn more than 80% of Clark County over the next several hours.

“We got the water truck ready, and we were going to head south to help fight the grass fire,” she said. “Then, we realized that the fire was moving closer and closer to us, and we decided we’d better be ready to fight at home.”

Just a few minutes later, she was scrambling to grab a change of clothes for herself and the kids and load a trailer with cattle to move to a nearby wheat field. In the end, she had to head into the wheat field herself to escape the flames that engulfed her home.

“After the fire rolled over, my aunt and uncle made it out to the wheat field to bring me in. I couldn’t see anything for all the smoke,” she said. “I didn’t know which way was safe to get out.”

In two hours, all 30,000 acres of the Giles Ranch that Shaw operates with her sisters, Molly Beckford and Jenny Betschart; their families and her parents, Roger and Cathy Giles, had been left a smoking ruin. All three of the sisters’ homes burned. The ranch lost five horses, the Shaw family dog, half of the herd of 1,011 cows and 80% of the calf crop.

Beckford said the day after the fire brought overwhelming grief. But it also brought an outpouring of love and help from dozens of people.

“Many of those people are in this room,” Beckford said to a packed room of farmers and agribusiness leaders attending a meeting of the Agribusiness Council of Sedgwick County in late August. “We can never express how much that outpouring meant to us.”

Beckford said Shaw took charge of keeping track of donations coming in — hay, feed supplements, fencing supplies.

Betschart had stayed overnight in town with friends and said when she got back to the ranch, there were already people there, helping the family document their losses and begin the process of cleaning up and rebuilding.

“We easily had 75 people a day in the first week,” she said. “A church in Throckmorton brought five freezers full of homemade food. We were blown away by the kindness shown to us and other victims of the fire by cousins, neighbors and total strangers from across the country.”

The Starbuck Fire burned more than 80% of the land in Clark County –— a total of 600,000 acres — and ranks as the largest fire ever to hit Kansas. A dozen more counties experienced wildfires during the first week of March, but none even came close to being as large or as deadly as Starbuck.

Betschart said that they learned some valuable lessons as they progressed through the days and weeks of recovery and planning and rebuilding.

First, you need to know what insurance coverage you have, particularly in light of what it will cost to replace buildings and belongings.

“Too often, we think how much we spent for buildings and belongings, but not how much it would take to replace or rebuild,” she said.

She urged her audience to make a record of all the contents of homes and outbuildings. “Get out your phone or video camera and document everything,” she said. “I guarantee you that if you try to remember everything in the aftermath of a disaster, you won’t be able to. It’s impossible.”

Another piece of advice from the sisters is to keep all the names of people who donate help or supplies in a single notebook.

“We didn’t. We had notes on pieces of paper all over the place. When you get past the worst, you will want to be able to thank people, and it’ll be a lot easier if you have it all in one place,” Betschart said.

The sisters said ranchers should be aware that government indemnity programs provide far less money than it takes to rebuild. Livestock losses, for example are capped at $125,000 per entity. It will also take a long time and a lot of paperwork to take advantage of those programs, she said, in part because the offices that have to process those claims are woefully understaffed.

Among the bright spots in the recovery, Beckford said, is the opportunity to rebuild homes and outbuildings and change things that you didn’t like.

“There is some excitement in building the way you want and getting to tweak the things that didn’t work so well,” she said. She said they hope to have homes rebuilt by Christmas, and everybody is looking forward to getting their own space back.

“It will great for the kids to have their own rooms again and a place to put their things away,” she added.

For 2018 and 2019, the sisters said the ranch will be running a lot of stocker calves as they work to rebuild their cow herd. They are about half done rebuilding more than 100 miles of fence and hope to be done with that by the end of next summer.

The sisters said they are prepared for the reality of losing more cows who suffered burn injuries.

“Some of them are going to be OK, but we know some had burned udders and just won’t make it. The losses are emotionally draining. Those first couple of weeks were just awful when we had to work with the vets trying to determine which animals had to be put down and which ones would recover,” Shaw said. “We had some wildlife and parks officers who came to help us with that. Some of them got pulled off because they had worked too many hours, and they went home and put on their plain clothes and came back.”

She said they also learned the value of social media.

“Facebook was really our friend,” she said. “We just posted what we need help with, and people would show up and help. It was pretty amazing.”