National fire preparedness hits highest level

The national fire preparedness level has this week been upgraded to a level five – the highest level of wildland fire activity on the National Interagency Fire Center’s scale.

At this level, several geographic areas across the nation are experiencing large, complex fire incidents that have the potential to exhaust national wildland firefighting resources. Additionally, at least 80% of the country’s incident management teams and wildland firefighting personnel are committed to incidents.

At level five, all fire-qualified federal employees become available for wildlife response.

The level has been raised in response to 83 large fires across 13 different states, including Wyoming. In total, as of Tuesday morning, those fires had burned almost 1.3 million acres.

At the same time, 19,300 firefighters and support personnel were actively fighting fires, while type one and two incident management teams had been assigned to 35 large fires.

Seven fuel and fire behavior advisories had been issued in south/central Idaho, northern California, Northern Rockies and south/central Oregon. Many describe “extraordinarily dry fuels.”

Of those 83 fires, five are located in Wyoming. The closest is in Campbell County; the Dry Fork fire is 30 miles northeast of Gillette in timber, brush and short grass and is reported to be threatening structures.

On Tuesday, that fire was reported to be 3207 acres in size. A total of 82 federal personnel had responded, including two crews, ten engines and a helicopter.

“We had some county units from Zone 25, Oshoto, that went up and assisted them on the initial attack,” says Fire Warden Doug Leis.

The Crater Ridge fire was meanwhile located 31 miles west of Sheridan and was threatening residences. At 383 acres in size, the federal response included 119 personnel.

Other fires in Wyoming include two in the Thunder Basin National Grassland: the 4897-acre Morgan Creek fire and the 4093-acre Muddy Slide fire. On Tuesday morning, a reported 18 structures had been lost to the latter fire.

Wyoming’s five federally fought fires total 12,740 acres. As of Tuesday morning, none were contained – in fact, only four of the 83 nationwide fires had been contained.

Locally, says Leis, “It has slowed down, simply because the storms haven’t been coming through.”

That being said, as of Tuesday morning he was anticipating storms would shortly be arriving. If the forecast turned out to be correct, that would mean more lightning, “and it’s off to the races again,” he says.

Over the last couple of weeks, the majority of the incidents in Crook County have been small in size.

“We had the Buffalo Fire over on the IPY Ranch that was about 55 acres on July 12 and 13,” he says. “And then we’ve just had some little, single-tree lightning strikes that were all just real small stuff – nothing over an acre or two.”