Fires in Five States Termed ‘a Nightmare’

With no more crews or equipment to spare, the nation’s Western firefighting center scrambled Wednesday to cope with the worst 48 hours in its history.

“It’s kind of a nightmare,” said Erik Martin, a fire information officer on loan to the Boise Interagency Fire Center from Colorado.

More than 1,500 fires ignited by lightning striking an average of 50,000 times a day had been set in California and four other Western states, and hotter days and higher winds were expected to make the situation even more critical by the weekend.

At least one firefighter had been killed and 45 were injured.

16,000 Battle Fires

Some 16,000 firefighters, including National Guardsmen and prison inmates, were battling the flames on all fronts. So many crews had been flown in--from points as distant as Alaska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia and New York--that authorities estimated there were only about 1,000 professional firefighters available in the rest of the country.

The blackboard in the information center of the Boise fire center spelled out more problems in stark chalk letters: No air tankers. No lead planes. No helicopters.

“There have never been so many fires burning at the same time, and the fire behavior is so erratic because conditions are so dry and hot,” said Arnold Hartigan, spokesman for the center.

“The result is a really disastrous fire situation,” he said. “In 1985, it took us two months to commit all our resources; in 1986, it took us two weeks. In 1987, it’s taken us two days.”

Northern California, with its tinder-dry Sierra, had the lion’s share of the action--896 fires, at least half of them still out of control.

Another 600 were reported in Oregon, and several were burning in Idaho, including a 2,600-acre blaze that forced 1,000 residents from their homes. Several small fires were burning in Nevada and Wyoming, including one near Yellowstone Park.

The biggest single blaze was one that began 32 days ago in the mountains of central Idaho. It burned 17,500 acres, doubling its size in a single day, after being left to burn itself out, and fire officials said no effort was being made to control it.

“Policy now is to let these fires alone in wilderness areas, because it is part of the normal ecosystem,” U.S. Forest Service spokesman Samuel Harrison explained. “And in any case, I don’t know where we would get the men and equipment to make any kind of fight.

‘At Our Limit’

“We’re at our limit--and past it--already.”

The National Weather Service offered little hope of relief. Thunderstorms and high temperatures were expected to continue throughout the West for the next day or so, and meteorologists said a weak upper-level low pressure area would fan the flames with winds gusting to 30 m.p.h. or more.

In California, where more than 230 square miles of timber and brushland have been laid waste by lightning-sparked fires since last Friday, nearly 12,000 firefighters--some of them from as far away as Maine and New York--were on the line.

Although most of the fires were in remote areas, posing little danger to structures or people, about 700 residents of Tuolumne City were ordered to leave their homes as a 50-foot-high wall of flame moved toward the eastern outskirts of their community, near the northern entrance to Yosemite National Park.

“We just moved up here, so it’s a big shock,” Renee Ohler, 17, said as she and her brother stood with several other spectators on a mountain road near the hamlet of Wards Ferry, watching as tree-eating flames rose up a ridge from a black, smoke-filled valley.

“It’s really scary. We’re just waiting to see if they’re going to evacuate us.”

Ohler and her brother Don, 22, moved to Tuolumne City from San Jose a month ago. They run a cafe in town.

Their home, and all the other dwellings in Tuolumne City, remained undamaged late Wednesday. But elsewhere in the state 20 structures, including four homes, had been destroyed in the fire epidemic, which also accounted for 52 injuries and was blamed for the death of one firefighter who was struck by a tourist’s motorcycle.

Acrid White Sky

At the 55-acre compound of the Boise Interagency Fire Center, smoke from Idaho’s fires turned the crystalline sky an acrid white as the hamstrung staff choreographed the fire wars.

The center was established in 1965 to coordinate firefighting among federal and state agencies.

In the machine shop, firefighters’ axes were sharpened. At the smoke jumpers’ base, the last man out packed 70 pounds of equipment into his orange bag.

In a cool yellow bungalow blinking with computers, technicians watched green blips pulse across a screen, filling in a map of 11 Western states.

“Lightning strikes,” explained branch manager Steve German.

The $7.5-million fire detection system uses mountaintop automatic weather stations, satellites and computers to report lightning strikes, wind conditions and other fire factors.

Fire managers using hand-held calculators can summon the data with the flick of a finger at a fire site.

The computers become fire gypsies, predicting which direction a fire will burn, how many acres it can consume, and even how high the flames will be.

German said the number of lightning strikes was actually below normal right now.

“On an average summer afternoon, there are 6,000 to 8,000 lightning strikes an hour,” German said, watching the green blips tally 497 strikes in 18 minutes.

“This season, we’re actually low, averaging about 2,000 strikes an hour,” he added.

But drought conditions have left Western wild lands bone-dry, and hot weather and winds of up to 30 m.p.h. have added to the fire risk.

Danger is not something Ross Catron likes to think about.

The 35-year-old Utah firefighter got a call at midnight, left his sleeping wife and four children at 4 a.m. and wound up on standby at Boise 10 hours later.

“We don’t even know where we’re going,” he said as the rest of the 20-member crew relaxed while waiting at the restaurant for a plane to ferry them to a fire.

“We’re waiting to see where we’re needed most,” Catron said.

The office’s bottle of aspirin was down to the last five tablets and the supply of double-strength antacid was dangerously low, but the troubleshooters were keeping their cool.

By Wednesday evening, the California Department of Forestry said 141,243 acres had been burned thus far in the state--an increase of 51,000 acres in less than 24 hours.

Another 1,400 lightning strikes--and 100 new fires--were reported Wednesday.

Besides the fires threatening Tuolumne City, other major fires still burning out of control Wednesday included one near the Pine Mountain Lake community, where dozens were evacuated in case that fire jumped the middle fork of the Tuolumne River; an 8,000-acre fire about 17 miles northeast of Willits; a fire that forced evacuations from threatened homes at the Big Oak Flat entrance to Yosemite, and a timber fire in Sequoia National Park near the town of Three Rivers, about 30 miles east of Visalia.

Evacuation orders were issued Wednesday afternoon for the Milford community, 20 miles south of Susanville, after a 5,500-acre fire that threatened that tiny Lassen County community earlier this week reversed directions again and headed back toward the town.

Still other fires continued to threaten homes near Lake Pillsbury and in the Scott Valley region just north of the California-Oregon border, and a 3,000-acre blaze was spreading rapidly in a remote part of Joshua Tree National Monument near Twentynine Palms in San Bernardino County.

In Oregon, Gov. Neil E. Goldschmidt invoked the state Conflagration Act, giving the state fire marshal authority to order state firefighting crews onto private property and to force residents to evacuate their homes if necessary.

“Some people are going to want to stay in there with a garden hose, but we’re trying to prevent that,” said Don Smurthwaite, spokesman for a fire command center in Medford.

Numerous blazes filled the Rogue Valley of southern Oregon with dense smoke, and people with breathing problems were urged to curtail outdoor activity until conditions improve.

Josephine County Sheriff’s Maj. Dan Calvert said 450 to 800 residents of the Takilma area near the Oregon-California border were being moved out, along with scattered families in the mountainous Galice area north of Grants Pass, some of which have no phones or electricity, and in Douglas County, about 100 homes in an area north of Myrtle Creek were evacuated.

About 3,200 firefighters were on the lines in Oregon Tuesday, with another 800 being brought in from around the country. “We’ve actually quit counting fires, since so many have burned together,” state Department of Forestry spokesman Ron DeHart said from an interagency fire command post in Salem. “We have got probably a dozen real hot spots in the state.”

In Idaho, the 2,600-acre range fire near Pocatello that forced the evacuation of 1,000 residents and destroyed a $200,000 home was contained at 6 p.m. Wednesday, and Bureau of Land Management spokesman Tim Kimble said crews should have it fully controlled by Saturday or Sunday.

The largest fire in the West--called the Deadwood Summit blaze, which began Aug. 4 in Idaho’s River of No Return wilderness--was still burning out of control, and no efforts were being made to contain it because it appeared to pose no threat to life or property.

But firefighters in the Challis National Forest are battling to suppress a 200-acre fire that started over the weekend. Shoshone firefighters from the Bureau of Land Management battled an 800-acre fire near Hill City, west of Fairfield, and to the north, about 27 miles southeast of Grangeville, about 15 fires raged in the Nez Perce National Forest, north of the Salmon River. In Wyoming, Yellowstone National Park spokesman Greg Kroll said an 81-acre fire about two miles west of the park’s south entrance was being allowed to burn since it posed no threat to visitors or facilities.

Craig Warner, the Bureau of Land Management’s fire coordinator for Wyoming, said about 320 firefighters have been sent to help fight the larger fires.

Warner said only a few firefighters have been kept in Wyoming.

“There’s nobody left to send,” he said.

Tamara Jones reported from Boise, Ida., and Ted Thackrey Jr. from Los Angeles.