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Wildfire burns on Fort Hall |
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Tuesday, 12 August 2008 |
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By Emily Hone BLACKFOOT — A fire suspected to have been sparked by lightning two days before firefighting efforts began had burned an estimated 800 acres of wildland on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation on Monday but was expected to be contained that evening.  Dave Breshears
A wildfire burns on the Fort Hall Reservation in the Cove area.
Becky Martin, interim emergency services director for the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, said a caller reported a fire in the Cove area last Friday, but couldn’t be found by a crew dispatched to fight it. However, she said, a fire began burning in the same area on Sunday.
“They’re not sure of the cause, but they’re leaning toward lightning,” Martin said at a news conference Monday.
“They think it was what they call a ‘sleeper,’ a fire that smolders for a period of time before suddenly bursting into flames.”
Lynn Ballard from the Eastern Idaho Interagency Fire Center said even though the suppression effort got off to a slow start, the suppression effort was going well on Monday with six heavy engines, a water tender, one bulldozer and two 20-man hand crews hacking out a fire line. “We’ve got about eighty people out there working on the fire,” Ballard said.
They were aided by two planes dropping chemical retardant and a helicopter that was scooping water from the Blackfoot River and dropping it on the hotspots.
The fire had spread along the mountainside and burned down to the edge of the Blackfoot River through heavy juniper and aspen groves in the steep draws that rise above the Cove.
Ballard said the terrain was too rugged to get mechanical firefighting equipment in, so the ground crew was fighting its way over and around the draws to build a fire line.
“They estimated it was seventy percent contained by Monday morning,” Ballard said. “They hoped to knock its head down and get a line around it by evening.”
The effort was aided by cooler temperatures and low wind speeds for much of the day on Monday, but Ballard said that evening, a spark somehow found its way to the east side of River Road across the river from the Cove and started another blaze around noon.
“Somebody spotted it pretty quickly,” he said, “but it went through a small stand of juniper and burned about an acre before they got it out.”
He said an estimate of the percentage of containment wouldn’t be available until later Monday evening.
A Command Center for the fire was to be set up just off Little Indian Road on Monday where the firefighters would be fed and allowed to rest.
Blackfoot resident Dave Breshears was camped along the river north of the Cove with his family last weekend, and spotted the fire as they drove up the hillside to head for home Sunday.
The family stopped to watch the blaze, and Breshears provided the Morning News with early photos of it.
“It was already burning pretty good by the time we started up the hill and saw it,” Breshears said. “It had a substantial start.”
Breshears said they stayed and watched the fire until so many people began arriving he feared it was getting dangerous. “They were coming up that road fifty and sixty miles an hour to get a look at it,” he said. “The cars were lined up so far I was starting to get worried about what might happen, so we left.
“It was a heck of an experience to watch,” he added, “but it was really sad to see so much of that beautiful country burning. We even saw a deer running ahead of the fire and going into the brush along the river. It must have been terrified.”
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 13 August 2008 )
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