[Vision2020] 4-8 homes confirmed lost in 3, 500-acre Highway 12 blowup

Tom Hansen thansen at moscow.com
Tue Aug 20 05:16:25 PDT 2013


Courtesy of the Missoulian (Missoula, Montana) at:

http://tinyurl.com/msj3eyh
 
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4-8 homes confirmed lost in 3,500-acre Highway 12 blowup

LOLO – What was a small lightning-strike fire on Saturday exploded across both sides of U.S. Highway 12 on Monday afternoon, threatening lives and burning homes as it went on a wild 3,500-acre run.

By 5:30 p.m., the West Fork II fire was igniting spot blazes just a half-mile west of the fire camp at Woodman School. Between 10 and 13 miles west of Lolo, both sides of the canyon were aflame from highway to ridgetop. Many residents had just minutes to evacuate as neighboring fields ignited.

By nightfall, firefighters confirmed that four to eight homes had been lost in the blowup; the exact number had not been verified. Highway 12 was closed to through traffic from Lolo to the Idaho border, and several hundred homes from Bear Creek Road to Sleeman Gulch had been given pre-evacuation notices.

“It was burning the pasture next door,” said Joe Camp, who’s lived along Lolo Creek Road for 10 years. “I got hit by an ember as I was running to the motor home. Just as I was leaving, a fire engine came in and started spraying people’s houses. I don’t know what to expect when I go back – whether the house will be there, or the trees.”

Camp said he grabbed his laptop computer and some mementoes his wife asked for before heading to safety.

Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation spokeswoman Cindy Super said an early Saturday thunderstorm ignited several fires in the Lolo Creek canyon.

“Yesterday there were four fires in the area,” Super said on Monday afternoon. “These were the two we couldn’t keep contained.”

Even on Monday morning, though, the West Fork II and the Schoolhouse fires were a combined 70 acres.

A temperature inversion kept a lid on the canyon, as high-altitude winds started blowing in from the west. But a red flag warning was in place, and around noon the warning came to pass.

“As soon as the inversion broke, that allowed the winds to reach the surface,” said meteorologist Mike Johnson, at the National Weather Service in Missoula. “It made the fire easier to spread.”

At 2 p.m., a few flames could be seen running along the ridgetop north of Woodman School. Firefighters were assembling in the field below the school and waiting for an incident command post to be established.

Above them, two helicopters and Neptune Aviation’s BAe-146 jet and P2-V tankers were trying to check the fire north of the ridgetop. The Schoolhouse fire had already triggered closures of roads around Blue Mountain and was threatening homes in the Sleeman Gulch, O’Brien Creek and Graves Creek areas.

School groundskeeper Kory Van Ostrand had just finished mowing the Woodman playground grass and was setting up sprinklers around the buildings. While helicopters and air tankers worked the ridge above, he pointed to the column of smoke building farther west.

“That’s the one to be worried about,” Van Ostrand predicted of the West Fork II fire, which he’d seen the day before burning a single tree. “That one is going to be a doozy. It will get hot and stay hot for a while.”

Three miles up the road, Van Ostrand was proved right, as flames roared over a ridgeline south of Bear Creek Road and marched downhill in less than 15 minutes. One motorist described seeing embers “the size of bats” falling across the highway, and within minutes, the north slopes above Lolo Creek were aflame.

Spot fires caught in the grass of the barrow pits along the highway, expanding from tabletop size to living room size in seconds. Winds shifted frequently, first blowing due east down the highway corridor, then north across the highway.

One arm of the fire crossed the highway just west of Bear Creek Road, moved behind a low hill, and reappeared two miles to the east above a complex of ranch employee houses and hay bales.

Workers at the OZ Ranch were scrambling to move about 150 cattle from a field on the south side of the highway to the north side, despite the fire burning on both sides. The gamble was that the West Fork II fire was burning northeast toward the western edge of the Schoolhouse fire, and both might keep moving away from the new pasture. As of 6 p.m. Monday, the gamble appeared to pay off.

Other residences were not as lucky. Law enforcement officers reported hearing propane tanks exploding at some of the properties around Bear Creek early Monday evening. Fire officials confirmed that four to eight structures had burned.

*****

As the fire blew up, a pair of horses wandered loose in a gravel pit alongside Highway 12 as residents tried to find a trailer to remove them. A passing sheriff’s deputy yelled at everyone to leave.

“There’s nothing we can do about that,” he shouted. “We are trying to save people’s lives,”

Lolo resident Lyra Kester was going house-to-house warning residents. At one home, she found two dogs barking inside an empty, locked sun porch. She broke out a screen and handed out one poodle, returning a few minutes later with a larger dog that willingly hopped into the portable kennel she’d put in her truck. The dogs were later reunited with their owners.

“In the 2000 fire at Eight Mile, we lost everything,” Kester said. “I’m not leaving these guys behind. This mountain is so tinder-dry.”

At a checkpoint just east of Elk Meadows Road, Missoula County Sheriff’s Capt. Brad Giffin said the hope was that the fire might hit that drainage and slow down enough for defenses to assemble. The complex’s explosive growth was complicated by two small, separate state and U.S. Forest Service firefighting teams that were not in communication with one another when the fires suddenly grew together.

“It’s moving so fast, you can’t even outrun it in a car,” Giffin said at 4:15 p.m. “It’s on both sides of the creek now, about three-quarters of a mile from the (Woodman) schoolhouse.”

Giffin said law enforcement officers were able to evacuate campers from several national forest campgrounds along Highway 12, but he was uncertain how many backpackers and other hikers might be in the area. The Lolo Creek drainage is popular with huckleberry pickers at this time of year.

By 4:30 p.m., the fire had reached the western edge of Elk Meadows Road when another change in wind caused the column to spread out. Instead of a distinct tower of smoke on the fire’s leading edges, dark brown haze descended to the creek bottom, reducing visibility to about 100 yards. Thirty minutes later, the brown wall had moved within a half-mile of the fire camp, as had a few of the barrow-pit spot fires.

A Type II incident command team that was just transitioning off the 635-acre Nimrod fire near Bearmouth east of Missoula was assigned to take over the newly renamed Lolo Complex, a combination of the West Fork II and Schoolhouse fires.

By 7 p.m., a Type I team was en route and will take over communications and strategy for the whole burn area along Highway 12 on Tuesday.

Evacuees were offered shelter at Christ the King Church in Missoula, and Missoula County officials were arranging care for pets, large animals and other livestock. The number to call for Missoula County Disaster and Emergency Services information is 258-4636.

Tuesday's forecast in the Lolo area calls for less winds, but continued temperatures around 90 with relative humidity around 15 percent.

“It will be a pretty active fire day," meteorologist Johnson said. "But it's not red-flag yet.”

Standing beside his motor home, Joe Camp said he was determined to be optimistic.

“Everybody’s working hard,” he said as a line of 14 city fire engines rumbled westward up Highway 12. “But the wind’s sure blowing hard.”


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Fire traffic retreats on the closed U.S. Highway 12 Monday afternoon from the advancing flame front of the West Fork II fire that exploded to 3,500 acres, jumped the highway, burning both sides of Lolo Creek Canyon, and gave many residents just minutes to escape.



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Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .

"Moscow Cares"
http://www.MoscowCares.com
  
Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho
 
 

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