Anatomy of a wildfire fight

Set up at the intersection of Cameron Road and State Route 904 just west of Cheney on Wednesday, July 24, the incident command post consisted of a truck tailgate, a whiteboard and a lot of squawking hand-held radios.

The smoke-covered highway was closed, traffic being diverted elsewhere by Washington State Department of Transportation personnel. Vehicles occasionally passed by, kicking up dust on Cameron Road, some towing livestock trailers as they evacuated the area ahead of a wildfire burning nearby.

A foursome of single-engine Fire Boss tanker planes and a Huey helicopter dangling a large bucket occasionally flew overhead after dropping their loads of water on the growing wildfire — officially named the Graham Fire —after scooping it up from nearby Silver Lake.

It was a calm scene as incident commander Dustin Flock of Spokane County Fire District 3, and Cheney Fire Chief Tom Jenkins, serving as operations commander, calmly exchanged information with other firefighters via radio and coordinated with supporting agencies.

The scene was a contrast to the initial arrival and assessment of the fire, and the coordination of firefighting personnel and apparatus from a surprising array of agencies when they first began descending on the area, looking for someone to assign them a place to fight the fire.

Stomp it out

It was just after noon when Kyle Polack and his son emerged from the smoke along a rock ballast road paralleling the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks.

Fed by strong southwesterly winds, the fire, Polack said, was consuming the understory and debris left behind from a previous fire.

Earlier he and his son had spotted smoke and went to investigate.

“We tried to stomp it out, but it was bigger than we could handle,” Polack said of the fire heading toward his extended family’s various homes located along State Route 904.

Polack said a single wildfire hand crew, possibly from the DNR, was already at the scene trying to cut a containment line.

Behind him, smoke billowed, occasionally turning black as flames engulfed a tree.

Order out of chaos

Jenkins was one of the first command personnel on-scene. He casually ordered a staging area in a wide spot adjacent to the BNSF railroad crossing at Griffith Road, as other firefighters and brush trucks arrived.

It had been a long night for firefighting agencies after a large lighting storm had rolled through the area the evening before, resulting in nearly 300 cloud-to-ground strikes in the area, according to Flock.

District 3 Chief Cody Rohrbach would later say that his district alone battled 14 fires overnight.

By the time Flock and Medical Lake Fire Chief Jason Mayfield connected with Jenkins there were already two Fire Boss tanker planes and helicopter dumping water on the fire.

As incident commander, Flock began taking stock of the situation, asking questions to determine who was on scene, what assets were available and where they were needed to fight the fire, even as more assets and personnel continued to arrive.

Several weary hand line crews could be seen milling about, including one from the Airway Heights Correctional Center, waiting for an assignment.

While Flock sorted things out, Jenkins assumed the role of operations commander. Grabbing a blank whiteboard, he began drawing a rudimentary schematic of the fire that, at least on the board, was generally burning in east-northeasterly direction in an elongated triangular area north of the BNSF tracks, south of SR 904 and west of Griffith Road. The fire’s “heel” — where it originated, to the west — and its “fingers,” where the flames were advancing generally eastward.

Mayfield and his crew were assigned to protect threatened homes and structures along the south side of SR 904.

Finally, at about 2:30 p.m., a Level 3 evacuation — meaning evacuate immediately — was ordered for the area inside the triangle. A level 2-evacuation order, which means to be prepared to evacuate, would later be issued for the area east of Ritchey Road and north of SR 904.

Despite the smoke, BNSF trains had continued to roll at high speed on the tracks, seemingly oblivious to the fire and smoke. They later slowed to a snails pace.

Wildfire fatigue

and evacuation

Bob Hudson, a 22-year resident of the area, was sitting nearby in his truck watching events unfold. He expressed a certain fatigue relative to wildfires.

“We sweat it out every August,” he said of fire season.

The incident command was later moved after winds shifted to a more easterly direction, pushing the fire directly at incident command. Flock decided to move to the intersection of West Cameron Road and SR 904, where it would remain for the day.

By about 3 p.m., local residents were beginning to evacuate the area north of SR 904 as Sheriff’s deputies came knocking to inform them of the evacuation order. Some towed livestock trailers.

One elderly woman, who somehow made it past the detour, turned onto Cameron Road, stopping near the command post. She rolled down her window and asked with what appeared to be all sincerity, “Did you guys know there’s a fire over there?”

By mid-afternoon Flock estimated the fire to be 30-40 acres in size, but emphasized it was only a guess.

“That’s by my standing here and looking,” he said.

The only part of the fire visible from incident command was the smoke rising over a tree line.

Logistics of assets

A wildfire is no small logistical effort, involving coordination between a large assortment of agencies and resources, from firefighters and aircraft to chaplains.

In addition to local and regional fire departments, the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office was on-hand to help with traffic control and evacuation orders.

Hand crews and other assets from the state Department of Natural Resources were fighting the fire and coordinating their effort at incident command.

The Spokane County Health Department was also there to, among other things, help anyone impacted by the fire and help evacuate livestock.

Inland Power and Light was on-hand to protect fire personnel in the event a live power line ended up on the ground.

Fairchild Air Force base personnel were out fighting the fire, as were City of Spokane and Spokane Valley fire department personnel.

BNSF had a crew standing by.

Three other smaller fires burned nearby. But the Graham fire was the focus.

“This is the largest and most active fire,” DNR spokesperson Isabelle Hoygaard told reporters.

By 3:15 p.m. the evacuation level in the area between West Cameron Road and north SR 904 had been upgraded to Level 3, while a Very Large Air Tanker, or “V-LAT” — a wide-body passenger jet-sized tanker — was dropping retardant, not necessarily to put the fire out, but to slow it down to help hand line crews, Hoygaard said.

Change of

command

By 3:30 p.m., and after some initial confusion —it was originally called the Griffith Fire, but the name had already been used — the fire was christened with its official name: the Graham Fire.

By 4:30 p.m., its northern flank had grown approximately 800 yards long roughly paralleling SR 904, where air tankers had been concentrating much of their efforts.

According to District 3 Chief Rohrbach, 26 homes and other structures were threatened by the fire at the time. But by then things were looking up.

“It looks like we’re going to keep it south of the highway,” Rohrbach said. “We want to protect homes.”

Later Wednesday evening, control of the Graham Fire and three other separate and much smaller fires in the area, together totaling 100 acres with zero containment, were passed from local fire departments to a regional Type 3 Incident Management Team, or IMT, who set up a command post at Cheney Middle School.

From there they fought what became the Cheney Complex Fire for the next four days.

Late Wednesday night it was confirmed that the Graham fire had been started by lightning, IMT Information Officer Jeff Sevigney said.

By 10 p.m. Wednesday 50 homes remained under a Level 3 evacuation order on the Graham Fire, with 10 others under Level 1, according to Sevigney.

The fire complex did grow, topping out at 171 acres at its largest, with more 175 personnel working to contain it.

The fires were 100 percent contained by Sunday, when the IMT turned control back over to the DNR for monitoring, according to an IMT press release.

As of press time, a DNR strike team was monitoring the fire for heat and smoke, according to a spokesperson. After three days of no heat or smoke the fire is considered extinguished.

Lee Hughes can be reached at [email protected].