Cooler, rainy weather over the past couple of days has slowed the growth of Interior Alaska wildfires that have burned more than a quarter of a million acres over the past couple of weeks.
“The cool weather and the rain — it’s really benefited us. But we’re not out of the weather yet,” said Sam Harrell, a spokesperson for the state Division of Forestry and Fire Protection. “We’re still going to have high pressure lingering over the Interior. And with that’s going to come the warm sunny days. We’re still forecasting above-normal temperatures.”
But Harrell said firefighters made solid progress during the cool and rainy respite. They cut more containment line around fires and doused them with dozens of loads from water-scooping aircraft. That helped keep the 42,000-acre Pogo Mine Road Fire from encroaching toward the trans-Alaska pipeline. The fire is burning about 20 miles north of Delta Junction.
“It’s very close to the pipeline there, south of Shaw Creek,” said Harrell.
Harrell said the fire has burned to within a tenth of a mile of the pipeline right-of-way, and about a mile from the Richardson Highway near milepost 285. He said there’s not a lot of vegetation in the right-of-way to fuel a fire, and that the pipeline is engineered to withstand a wildfire.
“Of course, we would really rather it not, because we also don’t want it to reach the Richardson Highway and then of course the homes and everything that are along the highway corridor,” he said.
Harrell said two crews that were aboard a planeload of firefighters from the Lower 48 were sent to the fire, which is named for the road that leads to the Pogo gold mine.
“It’s not really growing and expanding in that area,” he said. “The only heat that we see is down in the Shaw Creek Flats, where it’s kind of working through the grasses in that boggy tundra down there in the lowlands.”
Harrell said state and federal fire officials on Thursday will stand up an Incident Command Post at the Deltana Fairgrounds in Delta Junction. Equipment and personnel will muster there to coordinate firefighting around that area.
One of the other crews on the plane was sent to the 14,000-acre McCoy Creek Fire southeast of Fairbanks, where an evacuation order remains in effect along the lower Salcha River.
“Firefighters are really in there, mopping up to ensure there’s no hotspots along the river corridor or in and among the cabins in there,” Harrell said.
Another crew was dispatched to 51,000-acre Anderson Complex — eight fires that are burning in an area southwest of Fairbanks, between Healy and Nenana.
“Multiple fires over there. There’s evacuations in place by the Denali Borough and also along the unincorporated area of the Teklanika River,” said Harrell.
The Forestry Division talked with area residents about the fire situation during a community meeting in Anderson Wednesday night.
Meanwhile, the federal BLM Alaska Fire Service has been fighting a cluster of smaller lightning-caused wildfires near the Alaska-Canada border northeast of Chicken. Spokesperson Al Nash said they’re not very large, ranging in size from a few acres to the 1,200-acre Wood Fire.
“There are some cabins. There are some residences,” said Nash. “They’re widely scattered. But, our goal is to protect those structures.”
The National Weather Service is forecasting more rainy and cool weather into the weekend. But Harrell cautioned Alaskans that longer-term forecasts call for a return to the warmer-than-usual conditions that’ve set in over the past couple of weeks.
“There’s still a lot of fire out there on the landscape,” he said. “And even though fire behavior has moderated, it’s still going to take a while to mop up these fires.”
Tim Ellis is a reporter at KUAC in Fairbanks.
