Fires Keep Town Hopping Businesses Buzzing As Firefighters Swarm Sandpoint

Traffic lights in downtown Sandpoint flashed yellow and red in the darkness before dawn.

Di Luna’s Cafe was starting to light up with the grubby yellow shirts of gathering firefighters. They dug into their scrambled eggs and hash browns like Pulaskis in the blackened duff.

“They’re always really quiet,” noted restaurant owner and chef Karen Forsyth. “When they come in for dinner, they’re so tired.”

Forsyth looked a little weary herself. At 5:45 a.m., she’d already been at the restaurant for nearly three hours, first preparing lunches for the fire crews, then breakfast. She worked until 10 p.m. the night before.

But it’s good money.

Di Luna’s is one of several local businesses getting a boost from fire suppression. Her breakfast business alone increased at least threefold on days she cooked for fire crews.

“I figure it costs us $40 a day per person,” said Tony Talbot, finance officer in the Sandpoint Ranger District. “That’s just putting food in their belly. They consume a lot.”

The district’s purchaser was spending about $5,000 a day, mostly on food, he said.

As of Friday, one fire alone in the Sandpoint District - the 120-acre Sheep Lightning fire - had tallied $173,000 in expenses since it started Aug. 10.

That’s nothing compared with Idaho’s Clear Creek fire, a 200,000-acre fire near Salmon, Idaho, that’s cost more than $40.5 million in tax dollars to fight.

“Because of what’s going on in Montana and central Idaho, we’re being told to keep our stuff (fires) small, if we can,” Talbot said.

As of Thursday, the U.S. Forest Service had spent $481 million on fire suppression, mostly in Idaho and Montana. The Department of Interior, which includes the Bureau of Land Management, had spent nearly $200 million.

That doesn’t include all the supplies the agencies already have on hand, such as fireproof clothing and Pulaskis, which are axlike tools designed for fighting wildfires.

The Forest Service has $840 million identified to pay for fire operations this year, but “our feeling is that the money that’s available to us right now will not be enough to pay the bills for fiscal year 2000,” said Stewart Lundgren, the agency’s branch chief for planning and budgets.

That means that by the end of the fire season, either the Forest Service will have to borrow from other agency funds or ask Congress for another emergency supplementary bill, he said.

“It’s real money. It pays real bills,” he said.

It’s buying case upon case of bottled water, fruit rolls and Gatorade at local grocery stores; chain saw and water pump parts in hardware stores; Porta-potties and showers all over the West.

A buyer for the Kootenai National Forest in Libby, Mont., estimated that in the last two weeks, the National Interagency Fire Center spent about $65,000 in Troy, Mont., for groceries, lumber and hardware.

“I think the impact is beneficial for them,” buyer Rick Stewart said. “We’re getting into more of a community relations problem over who is getting more,” Libby or Troy.

The purchasers have to be careful to spread the wealth. They take turns shopping at the different local groceries, and, in Sandpoint, several restaurants have been invited to provide meals. Purchasers keep a rotating list of motels where they send smokejumpers or overhead personnel.

In Libby, the fire operations are so huge - more than 47,000 acres are burning in the Kootenai National Forest - that most of the motels have been filled with support personnel, helicopter pilots and smokejumpers.

This weekend, they lost a lot of rooms because of prior reservations.

“This weekend is Nordic Days in Libby, and we’re scrambling to find rooms,” Stewart said.

Other businesses benefiting are those specialized services that are key to fighting wildland fires - such as helicopters.

Light helicopters cost about $1,000 a day. Medium-sized helicopters cost about $2,000. And the large, heavy helicopters that can carry 3,000 gallons of water cost about $8,000 a day, Talbot said.

Panhandle Helicopters out of Coeur d’Alene has a contract with the government to provide its three small helicopters for reconnaissance and thermal vision crews. The company has a three-year contract that reserves the helicopters for government use when needed for fire emergencies.

“Sometimes it puts us in a bind,” said Gary Baldwin, director of maintenance. “But our private interests understand that when fire season comes, if the call comes we have to go.”

The company had one helicopter working the Clear Creek fire for more than a month, but now it is back in the Panhandle.

Heavy equipment operators can get work building fire lines or maintaining forest roads during times of fire, if they’re certified. About 60 heavy equipment operators took a recent class offered by the state Department of Lands to get the credentials.

Then there are the crews, making overtime and hazard pay on the fires, and eating free. But when they have some mandatory R&R and they’re not shipped off to another fire, their dollars just might circulate through town, too.

Jim Couckuyt, a liaison for five Alaskan crews working in the Panhandle, was toting around a long shopping list through Sandpoint last week that included 28 pairs of wool socks, three cans of chewing tobacco, a hairbrush and shampoo.

He purchased a $347 pair of White’s boots and another $238 pair of work boots at Larson’s clothing store for a couple of crew members.

“We’ll buy another two pair of boots,” he said. “These are all deducted from their paychecks.”

Crews from outside the area were using the Sandpoint High School gymnasium showers and school buses until late last week for about $150 a day. Now the Forest Service is renting the Bonner County fairgrounds facilities.

But not everyone’s getting rich off the fires.

Outdoor Experience had a crew come looking for long underwear after the weather turned cold at night. “They shopped hard and left not spending a dime,” said co-owner Mark De La Vergne.

Diane and George Newcomer leased a hay field up Lightning Creek to the Forest Service for a helicopter staging area.

Their price? A token $50 for the duration of the fire season.

“It’s our forests that they’re protecting and we’re surrounded by forest,” Diane Newcomer said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing something just because it’s the right thing to do.”

In that same sense of team spirit, di Luna’s waitress Sylvia Mills said she didn’t mind that most of the weary firefighters don’t bother to tip.

Said Mills, “They deserve to be well-treated.”