Crews get handle on big wildfire

Firefighters on Sunday contained the state’s biggest wildfire, which had covered nearly 8 square miles of brush land in the state’s northeast corner.

“They’re going to do some more mop-ups tomorrow,” fire spokesman Clifton Mehaffey said Sunday night. “There’s some pretty stiff terrain out there.”

Crews contained the fire, dubbed the Hopkins Canyon Fires, at 5,130 acres, he said. The cool, calm weekend weather helped.

Another fire, the 2,415-acre Pot Peak fire south and west of Lake Chelan, grew 1,000 acres overnight and was raising concerns.

And a third fire broke out Saturday east of the lake that could also pose risks if not quickly reined in.

“It started when an owl carrying a chicken hit a high-voltage line,” said center spokesman David Widmark. He joked that “the cremation has already taken place.”

The 600-acre Beebe Bridge fire was burning light fuels on multi-jurisdictional land, Widmark said.

“If it gets out of the canyon that it’s in,” he said, “it has the potential of going to a subdivision” near the town of Chelan, just 3 miles west of the blaze.

Fire officials also were braced for the possibility of new blazes Sunday. “It is the Fourth,” Hollen said.

Containment of the Pot Peak Fire in northcentral Washington was “zero percent” Sunday, Hollen said.

“This is something we need to stop as soon as possible,” he said.

No structures were threatened at midday, Hollen said, but the blaze “has the potential for going off everywhere,” and there are homes and other structures in the area.

The Hopkins Canyon blaze on the Colville Indian Reservation is burning through country that is mostly “rock and grass, rock and grass,” Hollen said, and the fire is not threatening structures. It was burning about 300 acres of timber.

At Pot Peak, 460 firefighters “are trying to do some burnouts this afternoon,” Hollen said – setting fires to burn dry grass, brush and other fuels and slow the blaze.

The blaze is on steep, rugged Forest Service land about 15 miles northwest of the town of Chelan in the 25 Mile Creek drainage.

There were 11 helicopters and seven hotshot crews on site.

In a corner of the Pasayten Wilderness near the U.S.-Canadian border, crews had the 150-acre Freezeout Fire about 17 percent contained, Hollen said.

“It’s not threatening much on our side, but on the Canadian side, there are some communities and recreational assets,” he said. The terrain is “very steep, with very heavy fuels. It’s going to be a while before they can get it contained.”

All the fires were being fought with help from helicopters dropping water and fire-retardant chemicals. There were no reported injuries and no structures had been burned.

Lightning strikes were reported late Saturday in the Colville National Forest, Hollen said, but there was no word of new fires. Lightning has sparked most of the state’s wildfires so far this season.