West Plains Blaze Outran Firefighters

After a half-hour, they thought they had the small brush fire tamed.

Then the wind hit. The five-acre blaze leapt into some trees next to a green alfalfa field. Flames roared through the woods, hopping from treetop to treetop. Embers jumped the alfalfa field, igniting grass and timber and moving through more trees.

The West Plains fire got away.

“That’s when things got crazy,” said Chris Anthony, one of the first Spokane County firefighters at the scene. “The most frustrating part was it seemed no matter how fast you went, how quickly you got to a house, as soon as we’d get there, the fire would be there.”

Nothing could stop it Sunday. That afternoon, the fire started in a field near the corner of Christensen and Bowie roads and raced almost six miles, pushed toward Riverside State Park by winds of more than 30 mph. At times, the fire, driven by its own power, moved at highway speed.

Hour after hour, firefighters practiced triage, saving homes with defensible space and making hard choices to leave others behind. They worked through the night and the next day.

“They talk about the losses, but they don’t talk about the many, many structures we did save,” said Dick Gormley, chief of Spokane County Fire District 10, who didn’t sleep Sunday night. “A lot of the ones that burned were either burning when we got there, or the resources were somewhere else, trying to get there.”

Planes sprayed fire retardant and dumped water on the flames. Helicopters scooped water out of ponds.

Bulldozers and firefighters with shovels dug a trail around the blaze, removing grass, timber and other fuel from its path. Firefighters starved the fire by setting backfires or “burnouts” - burning fuel from the trail back to the fire.

By Tuesday, it was mostly a mopup operation. Firefighters made mud pies, using small hoses and wands to dig deep into black muck, drenching hot spots underground.

They set more backfires. And they finished digging 6,000 feet of trail.

“This is what most firefighting is about - the non-glamorous, the making sure the fire’s out,” said Bill Lewis of the state Department of Natural Resources, a firefighter for 20 years.

One crew tackled a hot spot south of Lincoln Road.

“The danger is in this area, the fire spotted, and it didn’t burn all the fuel,” said Kip Kelley, a DNR forester from Bellingham. “All it takes is a wind, and a little ember, and then we’d have the fire running again.”

Anthony, 20, has been fighting fires for Fire District 10 for about a year.

She saw one man who refused to leave his home. His family had left a half-hour earlier, but he wanted to fight. The fire was coming over the ridge. He stood with a hose in his hand as the fire hit his back porch.

“We went back there and got him, and put him in his car,” Anthony said.

The man’s house is still standing.

Anthony saw other people leave willingly, piling suitcases and animals into cars and trucks.

“As we were driving into the smoke, we saw people driving out,” she said. “It was very sad to watch them. Some were crying, others had looks of devastation on their faces. They didn’t know what would happen to their homes.”

Anthony battled the fire until 1:30 a.m. Monday, when she was relieved by reinforcements. That night, she couldn’t sleep. She stayed up with other firefighters and watched dawn’s orange glow. She sipped Gatorade and answered phone calls from people asking what homes had burned.

“It was really amazing,” she said. “I’d never seen anything like it before. You can’t control it. You have to outsmart it.”

, DataTimes