Sequoia Forest Fire Burns 67,348 Acres

As firefighters hunkered down for a long battle against a colossal blaze in the Sequoia National Forest, officials said Tuesday that they fear its size and ferocity is a worrisome omen for the state and the West.

Despite the efforts of more than 1,700 firefighters, by Tuesday afternoon the fire had consumed 67,348 acres of the forest, most of which is in southeastern Tulare County near the Dome Land Wilderness Area. Eight homes in the remote mountain village of Kennedy Meadows have been lost, and 200 more structures are threatened, though an evacuation order is scheduled to lift this morning.

The blaze, about 120 miles north of Los Angeles, was 40% contained Tuesday, said Doug Johnston, a Kern County fire engineer. The largest fire to strike the Sequoia National Forest in recorded history, it has been raging since July 22 and is not likely to be controlled before Aug. 10, officials said.

It is a humbling expression of nature: Walls of flame 70 feet high, twice as high as the nearest tree, leaping through canyons and valleys, at times in five directions at once. Left behind, quite literally, is scorched earth: The fire is so hot that it has scarred the soil. The burned ground becomes unable to absorb water, which could be devastating to the local ecology, officials said.

“It’s a barnburner,” said Dennis Pendleton, Forest Service director at the National Interagency Fire Center. “It’s cooking.”

Dubbed the Manter fire, it may be just the first big fire of the worst fire season since 1988, when wildfires consumed 5.2 million acres. As of Tuesday, forest fires across the nation had consumed 3.5 million acres in 2000--with the worst two months, August and September, yet to come.

“Only time will tell,” Pendleton said from his headquarters in Boise, Idaho. “Catch me in November and I’ll tell you how bad it was.”

Altogether on Tuesday, 35 large blazes were burning out of control in nine Western states, from Montana to Texas to the California coastline north of Cambria.

Among them was a fire that started on the Pechanga Indian Reservation near Temecula in Riverside County. The blaze had burned 4,722 acres by Tuesday morning as more than 1,300 firefighters struggled to put out the flames. No structures had been lost, but some homes, along with campgrounds, were threatened, said a spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry.

Across the West on Tuesday there were no reported serious injuries and, among all the fires, fewer than 20 structures had been destroyed, with the Manter fire taking the greatest toll, officials reported.

More than 20,000 federal, state and local firefighters were deployed to various fronts--thick forests, steep canyons and desert range lands. Each fire was fostered by the same twin devils of extreme temperatures and low humidity--exacerbated by lightning strikes and gusting winds spawned by dry thunderstorms.

“The next 10 days are going to continue to be active, and the prognosis doesn’t look good,” said Bob Valen, a fire information officer for the Interagency Fire Center.

Cold fronts out of the Northwest, he said, aren’t helping any because they are delivering “gusty winds from thunder cell buildups that aren’t dropping rain but are throwing down lightning bolts.”

Virtually all of the nearly 61,000 fires that have occurred so far this year were triggered by lightning, he said. “Most of them were addressed with an initial [firefighting] response, but some big guys got away from us.”

The thunderstorms that scattered Central California with moisture on Monday and Tuesday created the same sort of curse.

While firefighters prayed for rain, the storms brought little of it--just 0.08 of an inch in the Sequoia National Forest. Instead, they generated scores of lightning bolts, which only ignited more fires.

“It is frustrating,” Lee Bentley, a U.S. Forest Service spokesman, said Tuesday night at a command center hurriedly pieced together at an elementary school in Kernville, a lakeside town on the east slope of the Sierra. “They are tough--but they are only human.”

For beleaguered firefighters in some areas, however, relief arrived Tuesday in the form of reinforcements.

On the Pentagon’s orders, more than 500 soldiers from Ft. Hood, Texas, arrived in Boise on Tuesday and were preparing to ship out to the Payette National Forest, where another blaze had consumed about 15,000 acres.

And on Friday, 500 Marines from Camp Pendleton will begin a crash course in firefighting. On Saturday, they will start pitching in on some of the nation’s fires.

Military personnel will be assigned to clearing fire lines and extinguishing small hot spots, freeing professionally trained firefighters for more dangerous duties elsewhere, officials said.

The Sequoia National Forest fire was suffering from what firefighters consider a double whammy: First, the weather in the area has been unusually dry for two years. Second, there have been few fires to speak of there in recent years, leaving dry debris--giant piles of fuel--at the base of the region’s breathtaking stands of conifer pines.

The 1,704 firefighters battling the Sequoia National Forest blaze included about 1,100 ground firefighters, 104 engine companies, eight helicopters, 18 water trucks, 12 bulldozers and four air tankers. Officials have also closed several roads. The firefighting operation has cost $5.6 million so far, officials said.

It has also become a highly personal affair. In the command center, amid piles of maps and fire-battling plans, was this note left in front of one firefighter’s work space: “I love you! Mom.”

Many of the firefighters live in the area--and are familiar enough with some mountain towns that one map had an arrow drawn to a remote spot near Sacatar Meadow. Above the arrow, the map read “Vito Artukovich.”

“That’s his house,” said Chuck Dickson, a Kern County assistant fire marshal. “He’s the only one in the area, and one of our guys knows he’s there.”

Twelve firefighters have suffered minor injuries, Johnston said, such as sprained ankles and lacerations.

Houses and other buildings in Kennedy Meadows, Long Valley and Chimney Peak--all surrounding the Dome Land Wilderness Area, and not far from Manter Meadow, where the fire started--remained threatened by flames late Tuesday, Johnston said.

The largest blaze in the West on Tuesday was, in fact, a combination of 11 fires growing into one another in southeastern Idaho. By Tuesday they had burned across 186,340 acres of sagebrush, grass, juniper and big timber including fir, spruce and lodgepole, officials said.

“We’ve just had three additional [fire] starts from lightning, and one of them went to 70 acres in just a few minutes,” said a frustrated firefighter. “It’s terribly dry up here.”

Among the largest fires in Nevada was a 66,188-acre blaze 15 miles northeast of Wells that began last Wednesday. It was burning through pinyon, juniper, sagebrush and grass, and was expected to be contained today.

Another fire had burned nearly 16,000 acres, about 40 miles northeast of Pioche near the Utah border. It also started last Wednesday, was burning through pinyon pine and juniper trees, and had destroyed one ranch home.

It was about 50% contained and firefighters expected to have it encircled by Friday.

Gold reported from Kernville, Gorman from Las Vegas.

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Summer Wildfires

Firefighters say 35 major wildfires are blazing in nine Western states. Among the 10 largest is the Manter fire in California’s Sequoia National Forest.

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Source: National Interagency Fire Center