A new map of the Sockeye Fire shows the fire grew modestly on Monday, to 7,585 acres.
Pete Buist, spokesman for the Alaska Interagency coordination Center, says it’s possible that no additional structures were lost Monday.
“While there was a lot of fire activity, there was not significant fire spread,” he said. “And very little fire spread to south. The fire activity was primarily in the Northeast and southeast corner of the fire.”
Buist says today’s weather forecast might make for a difficult day.
“We’re looking at more hot dry weather today and probably it will be complicated by some forecast dry thunderstorms in the afternoon,” Buist said. “These sorts of occurrences can cause erratic winds that sort of challenge firefighters that are trying to hang onto a fire that we hope won’t move again.”
Command of the firefighting response switched this morning to the Type 1 Incident Management Team at 7 a.m.
Type 1 teams are deployed to the most complex wildfires, to manage state and federal resources.
Liz Ruskin is the Washington, D.C., correspondent at Alaska Public Media. Reach her at lruskin@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Liz here.
