I was in Home Depot picking up door hardware for the finishing touches on the house when my friend and neighbor Laura called to tell me that there was a fire on Moose Mountain. I've worked enough with Alaska DNR Division of Forestry and Alaska Fire Service to know that they would be on it asap so I wasn't too concerned. I called Jen Northway, the coordinator for the Alaska Fire Science Consortium to see if she had any intel. I casually finished checking out. I called Joe to see if he was home. Yes, he was. He could tell there was a fire, but everything seemed okay. When I got out to my car the winds were so strong, it blew my shopping cart across the parking lot.
As I drove home I grew more and more concerned upon hearing the news alerts on the local radio. My co-worker forwarded a University text alert: "UAF POLICE: Wildland fire in the area of Monteverde Road and Moose Mountain." We live on Monteverde Road - about 1/2 mile from Moose Mountain Road... Joe called me to say the smoke plume was getting bigger. I asked him to go into the house and get the cats in their boxes (no small feat, I knew - especially since girl cat is nearly too fat to fit in her box!) I thought about the most important things to load into the car. Wilson and the cats, the photo of my grandmother on my dresser, the computers. I wished that I could locate the recipe book that my grandmother had hand written for me for Channukah when I was 14 years old. I had looked for it at Passover, but I had packed it away someplace "safe" before the house move last summer. And I could not find it...
When I got home, Joe was moving the scrap cardboard that had been piled up near the house. He had gotten the cats in their boxes and shut off the fuel lines and the gas. We spent about half an hour wandering around trying to tidy things up - getting flammables away from the house and shed. Marking the water lines on the house, moving the boats to the end of the driveway.
It wasn't too long before a fire crew showed up, dressed in yellow nomex shirts and blue pants. They were a structure protection crew from Ft. Wainwright. They asked me which structure I would like them to focus on for protection, the new or the old.... no brianer! Voluntary evacuation, they said. Their first priority is protection of life, then property, implying that if we're here, less time and energy they'll have to save the house. They did a quick hazard assessment and parked their engine at the end of our driveway.
Mean-while helicopters are flying over with water buckets, tanker trucks with retardant loads, and surveillance ships are buzzing the house. Neighbor's chain saws are whining as people cut trees.
I loaded the cats, Wilson, the computers and my grandmother's photo into the Subaru. But it was too exciting to head off the Mountain, so I parked in my neighbor's driveway across the street. The engine crew wouldn't let us park on the road. It was their escape route. And engines were protecting only the houses on the north side of the road. I headed back to help Joe cut the spruce trees behind the house and to pick up the highly flammable lichen encrusted limbs and toss them away from the house.
Mean-while, five, 20-person hot-shot crews have hiked into the woods. My neighbor Pips Veazy could see flames through the woods from her upstairs window.
Tom called from the Seattle airport. He's on this way home from an NSF panel review in Chicago. He's missed all of the excitement this year. Ice storm in November, snow storm in March - and now fires in May...
By 8:00pm the sun was lower, temperatures were dropping and relative humidity was on the rise. At around 9:30pm the structure protection crew headed out. The fire chief said that the fire had "laid down" for the night and that they were passing things off to the DNR. Fortunately, he said, this is one of the only fires burning in the interior right now, so there is not much competition for resources. They are going to hit it hard tonight, but tomorrow is forecast to be hot and dry with more winds, so activity could pick up again.
I drove back up the driveway and let the cats out of their boxes. They were whining and scratching so much at the door, that I didn't have the heart to keep them inside. Before I let them out, I gave them a super tasty treat, in the hopes that they would come back in again later.
I texted back my co-worker to thank her for the text alert and to let her know that things had calmed down for the night. She wrote back glad that I "could get some rest (maybe)." There are too many aircraft and chainsaws to rest too deeply, I replied, but I feel safe for the night.
Local news coverage: http://newsminer.com/view/full_story/13357144/article-Crews-controlling-700-acre-wildfire-north-of-Goldstream-Valley?instance=home_lead_story
