Unseasonable weather has re-ignited a wildfire near Delta Junction.
BLM Alaska Fire Service manager Kent Slaughter says the Mississippi Fire rekindled Monday due to 60 degree temperatures and warm dry Chinook winds.
“The high winds and warm temperatures dried out the dead grass and other fuels down there and pushed the fire across the control lines on Monday morning,” he said. “We’ve got about 10 people on the fire; it’s about 300 acres.”
The new acreage is additional to the over 67,000 acres the Mississippi Fire burned this summer.
The blaze started May 30 by an unknown cause on military land.
Slaughter says the newly active portion of the fire is in grass and brush on state land in an old burn area, about 2 and a half miles from the Whitestone Farms community, north of Delta.
He says the fire is not currently threatening anything, and anticipates cooler, wetter weather will soon subdue the activity.
“After the winds died down, we were able to get a better handle on things, so we were gonna hold with the personnel we have and not increase the number of personnel staffing,” Slaughter said. “We are already starting to run into some issues with access in terms of ice on the river, so we’re hopeful that as things get cooler we’ll be able to take a handle on this and be able to unstaff it again and just put it back into monitor status.”
Slaughter calls the late season wild fire very unusual. He says no other wildfire activity around the state, but adds the fire service is keeping an eye out given this falls unusual weather.
Dan Bross is a reporter at KUAC in Fairbanks.
