Fatal Wildfire Contained Following 2-Week Battle

A wildfire has been contained two weeks after it exploded and killed four young firefighters.

“We’re happy to get containment,” Donna Nemeth, spokeswoman for the interagency crews fighting the blaze, said Tuesday.

There is no estimated date for when the fire will be extinguished, Nemeth said. But she said the 9,300-acre fire in the northern Cascade range, though not completely out, presents no danger of crossing the fire line.

Forty firefighters remained to snuff out small fires that flared inside the line periodically, said Sharon Sweeney, a Forest Service spokeswoman.

Elsewhere, a shift in wind direction had helped crews trying to keep a 1,100-acre forest fire away from 170 expensive homes outside Jackson, Wyo. However, the wind was expected to continue shifting Tuesday. “This thing’s a sleeping giant out here,” said Joe Carvelho, fire incident commander.

The Jackson fire forced the evacuation of an unknown number of campers after it started Sunday. Flames got to within two miles of mountainside homes worth $500,000 and up.

The four victims of the Yakima fire were among 21 firefighters on mop-up duty July 10 who were trapped by the blaze, which exploded from 25 acres to 2,500 acres in less than three hours as it was stoked by stiff wind and high temperatures.

Tom Craven, 30, Devin Weaver, 21, Jessica Johnson, 19, and Karen FitzPatrick, 18, were killed by breathing superheated air as the fire burned through the area where they had deployed their emergency heat-resistant fire shelters. It was the country’s deadliest wildfire since 1994.

More than 5,000 people, most of them firefighters, police officers and federal employees, filled the Yakima Valley SunDome for the 2 1/2-hour memorial service.

The blaze is believed to have been started by an abandoned campfire.