Wildfire forces out six families
ST. MARIES – At least six families remained evacuated from their homes for a second day Saturday as nearly 100 firefighters attempted to contain a wildfire four miles west of St. Maries in Benewah County.
The Echo Springs fire, which started Friday afternoon, blew up from about 200 acres to about 550 acres in heavily wooded, steep terrain, said Idaho Department of Lands spokesman Bill Love.
The fire, of unknown origin, is on private land owned by Stimson Lumber Co. and Forest Capital Partners, Love said.
The town of St. Maries, in a riverside valley to the east of the fire, was not threatened, but a smoky haze from the fire blanketed the community at sunset Saturday.
No homes were destroyed, but several remained threatened, Love said.
The fire quickly moved to the east, up and over a ridge, forcing the Benewah County Sheriff’s Office to order evacuations for families in the Shay Hill and Cherry Creek areas southwest of St. Maries.
Residents of the Shay Hill area were evacuated last summer when another fire threatened their homes.
“We are not calling it contained, and certainly not controlled,” Idaho Department of Lands spokeswoman Mary Fritz said at sundown Saturday.
“We’ve been pounding it all day with water and retardant, but it’s still going,” she said.
Three helicopters and a CL-5 fixed-wing water tanker, along with three crop-dusting planes modified to drop retardant, were used to fight the fire from the air.
Residents of St. Maries and from the evacuated rural areas nearby were summoned to a town-hall meeting Saturday evening for a briefing about the firefighting effort, expected to continue well into this week.
Bulldozers plowed fire lines around almost all the fire on Saturday, Fritz said, but there was a lot of unburned fuel inside the perimeter. That is a continuing cause of concern, especially if winds or thunderstorms develop, and there were those threats.
Crews planned burnouts inside the fire lines to reduce the fuel supply, Fritz said.
Firefighters from as far away as West Virginia – already working in the Northwest – were on the fire lines, and more were being called in at midday Saturday when the fire was raised to a more-serious designation.
“We were under a ‘red flag warning’ for strong winds when the fire started,” Love said. “It was obviously a wind-driven fire.”
The Red Cross opened St. Maries High School for emergency housing, but the families chose to spend Friday night in campers and trailers they had moved to the county fairgrounds.
The families also took livestock and family pets – pigs, chickens, a steer, goats, and dozens of dogs and cats. The critters were being fed and cared for at the fairgrounds by the Rowdy Rednecks 4-H Club of St. Maries and the Benewah County Humane Society.
Kathleen DeMarsh, 16, and her sisters, Krista, 11, Biff, 21, Kelci, 19, along with their cousins, Nichole Nemeth, 19, and Calah Allen, 13, rode and led a dozen horses belonging to the family from their rural home two miles to the fairgrounds.
They did that after helping load four family pigs into a horse trailer for evacuation, Kathleen DeMarsh said with a smile.
“I just saw a whole bunch of smoke, and it was red in the sky,” she said. “We knew we had to get out of there.”
Her parents, Kenny and Sandy Moore, were allowed to return to the family home Saturday for the exhaustive task of moving several tons of hay just moved into the barn for winter feed. They used trucks and trailers to move the feed to temporary storage at a roadside clearing along state Highway 5 outside St. Maries.
Lynn Masterson, an adult leader of the St. Maries 4-H club, said the animal evacuation was a learning opportunity for dozens of boys and girls, ages 8 to 17, who pitched in to feed, water and look after the animals at the fairgrounds.
“We’ve got 24 horses, three calves, one steer, 10 pigs, three goats, seven chickens, 23 dogs and 13 cats,” Masterson said, rattling off the inventory without missing a beat.