news story / By Heidi Walters

Burning Down the Valley

Talking arson with the guy who has to mop up Hoopa’s insane number of intentional fires

(Oct. 15, 2009)  About 2 p.m. last Wednesday, a flame leaped up in the grass alongside Hopkins Road on the northern edge of the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation. In the days following, the fire burned through the steep Hopkins Creek Drainage, seven miles northeast of downtown Hoopa, and spread beyond the reservation onto the Six Rivers National Forest, consuming old growth timber and plantation trees. By Tuesday morning nearly 3,000 acres had burned, half on the reservation and half on Six Rivers, but rain had begun to fall and help douse it.

Smoke from the fire — dubbed the Mill Creek #4 — swept over the mountains to hover on the coast, and crept into mountain towns like Orleans. Almost as insidiously spread the rumors: One grower had burned another person’s garden. Or they burned their own grow to spite the oncoming CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Planting) forces. Or they’d set a fire to make a lot of smoke so CAMP choppers couldn’t make their snooping flyovers. One particular rumor that gained traction: It was a Mexican cartel.

Helicopter dips bucket in the Klamath to dump on fire. Photo by Ken Malcomson

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Carl Smith, a division chief with the Hoopa Tribe Fire Department, said there’s no evidence of a pot grow near where the current fire started. But he won’t rule out a pot connection — there was, in fact, a pot bust just last month up in Supply Creek, across the Trinity River from Hopkins Creek.

But who did it is really beside the point, Smith said. The fact that everybody’s pretty sure that somebody did it is the point.

According to a recent study, the Hoopa reservation ranks third among the nation’s reservations for arson fires. That presumably considers wildland fires and house fires.

Smith’s department strictly deals with wildfires. He said that of the average 194.1 wildfires on the Hoopa reservation, on average, per year, 90 percent are arson. The majority start right by a road, he said, and with most of them — including the Mill Creek #4 — natural causes such as lightning, and accidental blazes such as runaway campfires, are easily ruled out. Mostly they find evidence of a “hot start” — a fire deliberately started by a lighter or matches or some other device.

“But we never find the devices,” he said. “And whoever did it, their footprints are usually blown away.”

That leaves the investigation up to pulling information from potential witnesses or informants.

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