Revisit scene of Carlton Complex
Seven years after coming to the Methow Valley to fight the Carlton Complex Fire, Great Basin Incident Management Team 1 is back, working in familiar territory — and their own fire lines from 2014.
Incident Commander Evans Kuo is one of a handful of personnel on the fire who was also here in 2014, though back then he was the team’s field operations’ section chief.
“We were assigned the Carlton Fire, which was for the most part winding down,” he said in an interview this week. “We had the Little Bridge Creek Fire that was very active, and we also had a fire up north called Upper Falls.”
In 2014, fire crews were taking an indirect approach at Little Bridge Creek, working to construct dozer and hand lines and using natural features to attempt to contain the fire.
But summer was transitioning to fall, and they got a break.
“We started getting a series of rainstorms so we got enough rain on that Little Bridge Creek Fire we were able to change tactics,” he said.
Crews were able to get right up to the edges of the fire and attack it directly.
This week, Kuo and his team are back at Little Bridge Creek as the Cedar Creek Fire continues to spread from where it began early last month west of Mazama southeast toward Twisp and the Twisp River Drainage. Great Basin Team 1 arrived last week to take over management of the Cedar Creek fire from Northwest Incident Management Team 8.
“On this fire, since we remembered we had all those control lines on the ridges out there, we reopened those lines from 2014 and they are now part of the strategy to control the Cedar Creek Fire,” Kuo said.
Good rep
The Great Basin group’s work Carlton Complex fire has earned them a good reputation in the Methow. Last week, Twisp Mayor Soo Ing-Moody told the Methow Valley News she believed the valley was in good hands after hearing the Great Basin group would be back.
“I’m feeling pretty confident at the ability of what this team can do for us in the next couple of weeks,” she said.
The team is based in the Great Basin area — Nevada, Utah, Arizona and Wyoming — and as a type 1 national incident response team, regularly travels around the country to help with major events such as wildfires. Kuo said this is the first time his team’s been back in Washington since 2014, however, the Methow has been hit by fire after fire in the last decade requiring the response of similar teams.
“Certainly the community we’ve interacted with in Twisp and Winthrop, they understand fire, it’s very obvious,” Kuo said. “For us, we don’t have to break things down to the very basics. … They have a pretty good grasp of what it is we do and how we operate.”
Fighting fire in a pandemic
“If this was 2019 we’d probably be sitting here in person,” Kuo said by phone.
While firefighters are outside in the wilderness, presumably socially distant, they don’t live in a vacuum, and still face risks from COVID-19 as well as fire.
“COVID has altered the way we organize and support the firefighters,” Kuo said. “We recognize the fire presents a risk to the community, but … we recognize that we also pose a risk to the local community by potentially bringing in people with illness.”
Firefighters are isolating themselves, camping in spread-out areas and wearing masks when interacting with the community. No matter how careful they area, moving 800 people into a community at a time — just for one of our two fires — has risks at a time when the Delta variant has started to spread as easily as chicken pox.
“There is potential for that — for us to have an outbreak, but we’re taking a lot of precautions for that,” Kuo said.
Some changes
Their fire lines may still be there after seven years, but other things have changed to make firefighting more difficult this time around.
One is the climate. June’s record-breaking heat wave is making for an early and extended fire season.
“The fuels, the live vegetation probably would have cured a lot slower,” Kuo said. “We started getting our peak fire season two or three weeks earlier than normal.”
Without the drought, firefighters might have been able to use green grass and moist plants to help stop the fire in is tracks.
“We apply a lot of the same strategies, we just enjoy less success early on,” Kuo said. “In June sometimes you can get away with herding a fire into higher elevations where it can run into wet fuels. This year that tactic wasn’t working.”
Kuo has been fighting wildfires since the 1980s. After a 33-year career with the U.S. Forest Service, he retired in January, and is now working for the Idaho Department of State, which he compared to Washington’s Department of Natural Resources.
In the past three decades, wildland firefighting has changed considerably, he said.
“So I remember back in the ’80s and ’90s, other than Yellowstone, a 100,000-acre fire was all but unheard of,” Kuo said. “In the ’90s we had a lot of fires, but it seemed like we were able to catch them. We enjoyed a lot of success.”
The 2000s brought a new phenomenon — “megafires” — along with a large amount of tree mortality from invasive insects. Those dead trees made active firefighting in the wilderness very dangerous and sometimes deadly for firefighters. Organizations like Great Basin Team 1 adjusted their tactics to avoid those snags and the danger to firefighters, but there was a downside.
“Our ability to keep the fire small has gone down,” he said.
Now, fires in the tens and hundreds of thousands of acres are becoming much more the norm than small, quickly contained blazes.
The number of people living in remote areas around towns like Twisp and Winthrop has also increased, known as Wildland Urban Interface. Those “values at risk,” as the teams call them, add more work to their plates, but Firewise practices help, he said.
“This community, this valley, is no stranger to wildfire,” he said. “It’s kind of like if you lived in Florida, you’re probably very accustomed to hurricanes.”
