As strange fire grinds on, the pros do their jobs – Park Record

The Yellow Lake Fire Incident Action Plan for Sunday, prepared before dawn, ran 32 pages long and had to be finished in time for the morning briefing that would guide the actions of 848 personnel on the fire from 7 a.m. until 7 a.m. Monday.

There was the list of objectives, topped by safety of the firefighters first and always. The weather forecast, a change in ridgetop wind direction, still gusty. Best prediction for fire behavior, pushing generally northeast with moderate, quarter-mile spotting. The assignments across the divisions, including F, for Foxtrot, and H, for Hotel, and so on, this being fire nomenclature in a plan for the pros.

Then the air operations and radio frequencies, followed by medical emergency instructions, resources to protect, instructions for ordering supplies, instructions for camp and laundry services, a “fire friendly finance message” since even this world turns on keeping track of the dollars.

This fire racks up $2 million a day in costs, and the total tab by Sunday morning had reached $16.8 million. The approved budget for the full fire is $30 million, according to the finance officers. Not that the “full suppression” strategy stops at that point, but they’ll need approval if the costs exceed that.

The biggest expense? Air operations. But logistics, if not the sexy department, will rack up expenses with setting up fire camp, feeding, showering, supplying the firefighters with everything they need, including hose, lots and lots of hose.

The Dixie Fire in northern California, which burned a million acres in 2021, deployed 500 miles of hose. Some no doubt burned up, but most had to be rolled up and sent to Boise for cleaning and packing for the next fire. There’s always a next fire. This one has used as much as 10 miles of hose, officials said.   

The even more daunting job in real time might be the map making and updating. The map makers are making somewhere around 98 updated maps a day for the Yellow Lake Fire.  

The big one, literally, is the BAM — for big area map — prepared in the wee hours for the morning briefing at battle table scale. Sunday morning’s BAM of the fire had thick black lines drawn along much of the western perimeter of the fire, but most was bordered in red.    

Black is for securely contained line unlikely to change because the fire along those edges is cool to the point of high confidence that this part, at least, isn’t moving any further. Fire commanders estimated 20%-23% of this fire was contained.

Much of the red outline also has fireline on it, but mop-up hasn’t progressed to the level of black line confidence or the fire is still on the move, wild. Swaths of fire on the northeast to east sides were still on the move, in the afternoons spitting out spot fires a quarter of a mile to over a mile ahead of the main fire on the big days, fire managers said.

The forest where the fire began still puffed smoke, morning campfire like. Mosaic, as the fire managers referred to it, was the apt description for the mix of cool undergrowth flames that left tree canopies green, hot runs up slopes that burned everything, an untouched dry meadow surrounded by scorched and smoking trunks where a group of visitors posed for a picture.

Overhead, three scooper planes trailed each other in a line on the way broadly toward where Sunday afternoon’s muscular smoke column topped out in puffy white cumulus and then back in a few minutes to refill in Strawberry Reservoir. The easy availability of the water made the scoopers a valuable aerial tool.

Eight to 10 helicopters working the fire, mainly dropping buckets of water along with recon flights, were based at the west end of the Heber Valley Airport. The buckets hung 100 feet beneath the aircraft, which could target drops fairly precisely.

A key flight in the wee hours is to map by infrared the heat signatures of the fire. Firefighters “ground truth” this on the ground as they prepare one map after another and disseminate these to section leaders around the divisions, Foxtrot, Hotel and so on.

But there are plenty of other maps, as well, showing resources to be protected and where those values preclude dozer lines or handlines, even. Another map shows all the dead snags, and on this fire there are many with up to 60% of the trees killed by beetles since around the beginning of the millennium.

The only structure loss so far has been a couple of timber decks from logging. Firefighters seemed confident about protecting homes along the eastern edge of the fire, where it was backing down the steep slope to the North Fork of the Duchesne River.

The northern-northeastern edge of the fire headed toward the Mirror Lake Highway had their attention, however, if the wind pushing the fire more that way Saturday and Sunday continues. Besides the highway itself, they have set two lines of indirect dozer lines intended to stop the fire from reaching an area with cabins and campgrounds. As a precaution, they closed the forest north of the highway mainly because communication is so sketchy in that country and it would be very hard to evacuate people — namely hunters — in front of running fire.

Hunters are just one complication in a fire this time of year. Aspen stands, which during summer tend to slow wildfire, are dry in preparation for their winter’s nap and of course, there are the leaves, golden and flammable.

A relatively wet August gave way to a bone dry and windy September and so far into October. The first relief may come with a storm Thursday. Before that, though, firefighters anticipate more wind and switches in direction.

The last bigger fire in this forest was the 4,000-acre Box Canyon Fire near Smith and Morehouse Reservoir in 2016. The area had a total of 3,000 acres burned over the course of 20 years before that.

Then Yellow Lake, around 31,000 acres so far, Utah’s largest this year and grinding on since it began Saturday, Sept. 28. Humans started it, but officials are not saying much beyond that as their investigation continues.

The fire has gone on long enough that 14-day stints are elapsing and personnel changing over according to regulations guiding how many days in a row they work at a time. The command of the firefighting changed last week from a more local team to a command team from California, though that can be a misnomer since members of this group come from Kansas and Arkansas as well, along with plenty of local fire leaders salted in among the team.

Because of the unseasonable weather and dry conditions in the forest, and because the fire was started by humans instead of, say, lightning, the objective from the beginning has been a full suppression effort. That the fire isn’t out is testament to the fact humans are not in control here. Not yet, anyway.