news story / By Heidi Walters

Friendly Fire Fight

This year, the Forest Service is giving locals more space in the command room

(July 9, 2009)  Up in the Trinity Alps Wilderness, our first serious wildfire of the season is burning. It was sparked by lightning on July 1, along with 15 other fires on the Six Rivers National Forest that have since been doused.

The Backbone Fire exploded from 300 acres to 3,300 acres between Saturday and Monday as it overtook another fire coming over from the Shasta-Trinity National Forest side of the boundary-marking Devil’s Backbone Ridge. By Tuesday it covered nearly 5,000 acres. At press-time, hotshot crews had helped slow the spread of the fire on the ridge, which is 36 miles northeast of Willow Creek and just four miles east of the Hoopa Valley Tribe’s reservation boundary.

Map by Miles Eggleston/The North Coast Journal

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The incident report on California’s InciWeb Web site, which tracks wildfires, was hopeful in its Tuesday update, saying crews had made significant progress. And, in a phone conversation Monday evening, Six Rivers National Forest Supervisor Tyrone Kelley said the cooler weather and north-east winds predicted for later this week would help crews fight the fire.

“And we had good spring rains this year, and so it’s still pretty green up on top,” said Kelley.

But fire season has officially begun. And you know what that means: a great, collective inhalation by the mountain people of the last sweet mountain air before it’s replaced by a summer-long choking smoke. Not that it’s a certainty this summer will be like last summer, or other smoky summers, when the fires burned so long that some people had to leave their mountain homes and retreat to the coast just so they could breathe, only to return home after the winter rains began.

And, fire season generally means the flaring of another sort of blaze, the political one: over salvage logging, fire-prevention measures, smoke-sick elders and, especially, who knows the forest best — the locals or the Forest Service.

But this fire season, maybe things will be different — at least on that last issue. On Monday, Supervisor Kelley met with the Chairman of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, Leonard Masten, to talk fire strategy — and Kelley has had frequent meetings with mountain dwellers over the past year or so to talk fire prevention and strategy.

And, this Wednesday, Six Rivers will welcome a small team from the Atlanta-based National Incident Management Organization (NIMO) to assume command of the Backbone Fire until it is completely contained — a move that Kelley hopes will provide more continuity than in years past.

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