Probe into fire crew copter crash begins

BOISE – A team of federal investigators arrived Monday in central Idaho to review a helicopter crash that killed a pilot and three firefighters in the Payette National Forest.

Not far from the wreckage, a stubborn cluster of 25 blazes being called the South Fork fire complex was poised to flare up as high winds were forecast in the Payette’s parched mountain timbers.

Among those killed when the single-engine A Star helicopter nose-dived into an access road Sunday evening en route to a remote guard station were pilot Quin Stone, 42, of Emmett, Idaho; Payette National Forest employee Michael Gene Lewis, 37, of Cascade, Idaho; and forest employee Monica Lee Zajanc, 27, of Boise. The Valley County sheriff’s office said the name of the third Payette National Forest employee who also died in the crash was being withheld due to delays in notifying family members.

A seven-member team of U.S. Forest Service aviation experts and an agent with the National Transportation Safety Board met in McCall on Monday to begin its investigation.

It was not clear whether the three employees were awaiting assignment or attached to a specific fire, Payette spokesman Boyd Hartwig said. The helicopter was not carrying a bucket for water drops.

Evergreen International Aviation Inc., of McMinnville, Ore., owned the helicopter, said spokesman Tim Wahlberg.

The helicopter had been stationed in Idaho and used as a standby aircraft through a contract with the Forest Service.

“We don’t know a whole lot about the accident,” he said. “We don’t know the cause. There’s no idea what happened at this point.”

Fire crews are stretched thin across Idaho and the country. The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, which coordinates 15,000 firefighters nationwide, imported several teams of international firefighters from Australia and New Zealand last week to reinforce fire lines in the Northwest and northern Rockies.

The fire center was tracking 43 large fires across the country on Monday, including nine in California, eight in a belt of central Idaho forest, and six each in western Montana and Oregon.

In Idaho, a 280-person team is attacking the South Fork fire Complex. The top priority is for hand crews to bolster fire lines and divert flames from the cabin community of Yellow Pine, said Susan Marzec, a spokeswoman for the interagency team fighting the blaze.

“The fire is behind a ridge, so it would have to climb,” she said. “But it’s close enough to the town that we’re concerned.”

The 11-square-mile complex of lightning-sparked fires is burning in dry stands of subalpine fir and dense pockets of forest understory.

Layers of smoke began lifting from fire-choked canyons on Monday, heightening fears that the open air will fan runs up the steep slopes.

Elsewhere, the stubborn Potato fire, which has been burning in the conifer-lined peaks of the Salmon-Challis National Forest seven miles north of Stanley, grew to more than 25 square miles.

On Monday, a 737-person team attached to the blaze conducted aerial water drops and dug trenches on the fire’s northeastern flank. The Potato fire still threatened vacation cabins, a rustic mining museum and utility lines that carry power to a reclamation site at a defunct mine.

The fire, which already has torched a historic cabin, has been burning since July 27 and remained only 35 percent contained. So far, suppression efforts have cost more than $7 million.

Also on the Salmon-Challis, the 1,850-acre Trail fire, encroached on a dude ranch and guesthouse, which sits on a cherry-stem of private land surrounded by the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness.

Guests at the Diamond D Ranch were evacuated, but some residents remain, said Salmon-Challis spokesman Kent Fuellenbach.

“The fire is sitting on a ridge,” he said. “We’ve got a team up there and we’re hoping they’ll move it back down.”