Chasing Blazes: Area Firefighters Travel As Far As Montana in Wildfire Season

Ten Nevada County firefighters are battling a 46,000-acre wildlands fire in Plumas National Forest.

The firefighters arrived in Plumas on Sunday night. Those same firefighters also were in Wyoming and Montana putting out fires from Aug. 11-28, said Howard Carlson, an incident commander for the U.S. Forest Service.

There was little time to rest between the two fires - but that's the way it is, Carlson said. The crews get a couple days off, then head to the next blaze, he said. At a fire, the team's on duty 16 hours a day, he said.

The fire in Plumas National Forest is 20 miles west of Quincy in the Feather River Canyon, said a report from the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. There were 1,460 firefighters on the scene as of Monday, the report said.

There have been no large fires reported this fire season in Nevada, Placer and Yuba counties, said Fire Capt. Mike Deme of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

"Off the top of my head, I can think of only three that exceeded 100 acres," Deme said.

When there are relatively few fires in their home county, firefighters are sent where they're needed, Carlson said.

"We knew the Kate Basin Complex Fire (in Wyoming) was going to be tough as soon as we got there," Carlson said. "A firefighter from Oklahoma died as we were arriving."

Jerry Westfall, an air-attack supervisor on Carlson's team, is the eye in the sky for the firefighting team. He coordinates efforts with the operations officer on the ground.

"I was putting down fire-retardant coverage on heavy timber, and the fire went right through it," Westfall said. "The fire acted like the retardant wasn't there."

The Kate Basin Fire was two blazes that converged over 130,000 acres, said Tim Fike, chief of the Nevada County Consolidated Fire Protection District.

"We had a sagebrush and grass fire rushing to catch up with a timber fire," he said.

One fire was called "Blondie" and the other was "Kate," said Fike, who was interviewed Sunday before he left for Plumas County. Two or more fires together are called a complex, he said.

High winds eventually died, helping firefighters contain the Kate Basin Complex fire, Westfall said.

The team was pulled off the Wyoming fire and sent to Montana to battle a smaller but perhaps more dangerous fire, Carlson said.

The 480-acre Schely Fire was two miles east of the small town of Euaro and eight miles north of Missoula, said Mike Schlafmann, a spokesman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise.

To fight the Schely Fire, Fike, as division group supervisor, coordinated the efforts of four counties' sheriff's departments and fire departments.

When his duties in the county allow it, Fike joins the Forest Service to fight fires wherever he's assigned, he said. The federal agencies pick up the bill for his services. The other nine firefighters are from the U.S. Forest Service.

Meanwhile, Carlson heads up an incident-management team of about 30 firefighters, one-third of whom live in Nevada County, he said.

The management team leads crews used to fight the fire on the front line; lines up food, water and other logistics; makes sure personnel get paid; coordinates aircraft and plans firefighting strategies, Carlson said.

"What I do as incident commander is oversee and make sure everything flows the way it is supposed to," he said.

In Plumas County on Monday, fire activity was minimal, said an interagency fire report.

Local heroes:

Nevada County Consolidated Fire Protection District: Tim Fike

U.S. Forest Service: Howard Carlson, Dennis Stevens, Beth Lopez, Pat Farrell, Rick Maddalena, Jerry Westfall, Dave Spears , Donna Tate, Jen Collenberg

Back to NCCFD in the Newspaper