Wildfires still raging in Idaho
BOISE – An 887-square-mile wildfire that has burned near several communities on the Idaho-Nevada border continues to scorch a combination of grass, sagebrush and scrubby juniper trees in rugged terrain.
The Murphy Complex was keeping about 560 firefighters busy, including a Type 1 team that manages large, complicated fires.
It’s just one of 14 blazes burning from the northern Idaho Panhandle to the state’s southeastern corner. Idaho was the West’s busiest fire state Monday, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise. Wildfires were burning across about 1,300 square miles of the state – about twice the area burning in Nevada, the next-busiest state.
So far, no Idaho homes have burned in this round of fires, officials said.
Gov. Butch Otter issued disaster emergency declarations for five Idaho counties, which could allow them to get additional state support if large fires erupt in those areas in the next 30 days.
Cassia, Idaho, Nez Perce, Owyhee and Twin Falls counties all asked Otter to declare the emergency, citing fears that dry weather, hot temperatures and dry lightning will set off more blazes in coming weeks.
On Monday, firefighters on the Murphy Complex, the big Idaho-Nevada blaze, were being aided by diminished winds that have helped keep the flames within the blaze’s existing borders – an area roughly the size of Rhode Island.
That’s taken some pressure off an estimated 7,500 homes in more than a dozen small communities that had been considered threatened, though fire spokesman Chuck Dickson cautioned that renewed wind and escalating temperatures remain a danger.
Residents of Murphy Hot Springs, a 50-home Idaho canyon community near the Nevada border, have returned after fire officials lifted an evacuation order.
The Murphy fire is burning near a vast 120,000-acre training range used by military bomber pilots stationed at the Mountain Home Air Force Base. The range has radar equipment, as well as cultural sites including ancient encampments and petroglyphs important to the Shoshone and Paiute Indian tribes.
Residents of that tribe’s reservation at Duck Valley, which straddles the Idaho-Nevada border, have been without electricity since last Thursday after the fire torched 200 power poles. The Raft River Rural Electric Cooperative planned to transport a giant, 2,000-kilowatt generator from Denver today.
The lightning-caused Poe Cabin Fire six miles from the northcentral Idaho community of White Bird on a patchwork of federal, state and private land, had grown to 44 square miles, after it started last Friday in 5-foot-tall grass, then spread into timber.
The fire is less than a mile from a 25-home subdivision. Still, there’s structure protection on all sides of that development, as the fire spreads to the northeast and the south. The fire is 15 percent contained, said Forest Service spokeswoman Laura Smith in Grangeville.