Monroe blaze out after consuming 3,400+ acres

by  Signal American Staff

Firefighting crews wrapped up work late last week on the Monroe Creek Fire, one of the largest wildland blazes to strike the local area in recent years. The fire, which broke out Tuesday evening about seven miles north of Weiser near the confluence of Jenkins and Sheep creeks, burned more than 3,400
acres before it was extinguished Friday, reported Nate Marvin, chief of the Weiser Area Rural Fire Department. He said it was		A wildfire threatens the home of Regan and Francy Pack north of Weiser on Devil's Elbow Road the evening of July 19.

probably the largest blaze the area had seen since the late 1990s, when the Jackson Fire consumed a massive swath of ground on the Oregon side between Vale and Annex.

In addition to Weiser’s rural unit, responders last week included departments from Fruitland, Payette, New Plymouth, Ontario and Midvale, as well as the Payette National Forest. PNF assumed overall management of the fire, which was burning on public as well as private ground.

According to PNF, fire investigators determined the fire was caused by the arcing of two power lines. Investigators believe material from a bird nest created a connection between the lines, and the nest material started the fire once it fell to the ground. PNF said the fire brought no injuries or loss of structures, but WARFD’s Marvin said one land-owner lost a pumphouse.

Marvin said the Weiser rural department initially responded Tuesday around 7 p.m. with 15 firefighters, two engines and a water truck. This force’s first mission was to save the county’s radio repeater station at Jen-kins and Sheep creeks, located approximately 300 yards uphill from the fire’s starting point.

The effort was largely successful, preventing the loss of a building housing the station’s radio equipment, and of a nearby tower holding antennas. The only casualty, Marvin said, were four Idaho Power poles carrying a line that served the station, temporarily knocking out an emergency fre-quency for those agencies whose equipment at the repeater site also experienced battery backup failure. Marvin said the poles were replaced on Wednesday.

Within the first hour at the repeater station, part of the crew was split away to join the multi-agency effort under way on the big blaze’s Monroe Creek front, where shifting winds pushed the fire toward seven different homes at various times during the night. Marvin said winds were so erratic that some of the homes were threatened more than once. Fort-unately, though, “most everything had burned out around the houses” by the time the fire approached them a second time, Marvin said.
After spending a hectic night helping to protect structures, WARFD continued to aid firefighting efforts on Wednesday, providing two water tenders and approximately a dozen volunteers.

Approximately 120 fire personnel were assigned to the fire from the Payette National Forest. According to PNF, resources committed to the fight included three bulldozers, two medium helicopters, 11 engines, two hand crews, one Hotshot crew, one heavy airtanker, and three single-engine airtankers.

The fire occurred a week after the Bureau of Land Management’s Idaho Interagency Fire Prevention Team issued a statement urging people to start exercising greater caution in wild areas because of prevailing conditions. “Vehicles that are driven off the road onto dry grass as well as trailers pulled by vehicles that are giving off sparks are causing fires,” said the team’s Paul Waddell.

Locally, Marvin has noted that grasses in some locations have reached a height of three feet. The BLM team says the phenomenon is widespread. “Due to the large amount of late spring rain in some portions of Idaho, there is as much as three times the normal vegetation in places, causing the grass to be taller and denser,” the team stated. “This unusually heavy buildup of vegetation needs only a spark to ignite a dangerous wildfire.”
 

--WEISER SIGNAL AMERICAN
7/25/05