Flathead well-prepared for flames

By JIM MANN

The Daily Inter Lake

The sight of a mushroom cloud of smoke billowing over a mountain range is distinctively memorable, perhaps because it is such an apocalyptic sight, signaling a violent wildfire is somewhere over the horizon.

But it is something that people in the Flathead Valley have seen many times in just the last six years. On some hot summer days, there have been not one but several of the atomic-type clouds on the horizon.

Wildfire is by far the most common potential disaster just around the corner in the forest lands of Northwest Montana. And it is perhaps the type of disaster that the emergency response community is best equipped to respond to, according to veterans in the business.

"I would say that when it comes to the types of disasters that are possible in Flathead County, we are probably better suited for wildland fires than other events simply because we have so many of them," said Bob Sandman, manager of the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation's Northwest Land Office in Kalispell. "We're experienced at it, and that can't help but make you better."

Indeed, the Flathead has had a series of huge wildland fires in recent years. And those experiences have shored up local preparedness for wildfires on several levels.

At a basic level, the collective of local volunteer fire departments has evolved to a point where Flathead County is not entirely dependent on state and federal firefighting resources. The county has developed a "joint command" fire plan that prescribes an integration of local firefighting resources with state and federal resources in the event of a large escaped fire.

It wasn't always that way.

During the 2001 Moose Fire, a blaze that started on the Whitefish Range and blew into the North Fork Flathead drainage, county firefighters attempted to assert a joint command with federal incident command teams.

"There was a tremendous amount of friction," recalls Gary Mahugh, chief of the Creston Fire Department.

While local fire departments positioned for structure protection duties, leaving the backwoods firefighting to U.S. Forest Service crews, the federal incident commander did not take well to shared management responsibilities.

At one point, as the fire surged to the east, the federal command team ordered all firefighters to abandon Home Ranch Bottoms, an area along the North Fork Road with homes and a store. The Flathead County firefighters refused to leave.

"After every federal firefighter left, county firefighters stayed and protected many structures overnight along that section of the North Fork Road," Mahugh recalled.

Mahugh said there are reasons for the conflicts and different responses on the Moose Fire. For starters, federal firefighters often openly acknowledge that their specialty is fighting fires in forests rather than structure protection.

And at another level, Mahugh said, national incident command teams are accustomed to fighting fires in areas where local resources are not suited for combating huge forest fires.

"I think a lot of the time, these teams are so used to coming into an area where the people are saying, 'Save us,'" Mahugh said.

That's true, says Sandman, who worked for years as one of those elite national incident commanders. Sandman and his teams have showed up in communities with widely varying capabilities across the country.

Some communities, he said, are not prepared "for the magnitude of the incident they are experiencing … It's not a bad thing, necessarily. It's just a different circumstance. They do whatever they can to support us."

But Flathead County's response capabilities are in an entirely different league, which needs to be recognized by federal teams, Sandman said.

"In the fire arena, most if not all of the jurisdictions here are highly capable," he said.

After the Moose Fire, which burned more than 70,000 acres, a fight developed over how local departments would be financially reimbursed for their efforts.

But the county did not back off from the controversial situation. Local fire chiefs and the former county director of emergency services, Alan Marble, worked to refine the county's fire response plan to more effectively assert the joint command system in the future.

That opportunity came in the summer of 2003, when multiple large fires erupted in the North Fork and on the Swan Mountain Range west of Hungry Horse Reservoir. As Mahugh describes it, there was far better cooperation between local fire responders and the federal teams that responded.

At one point, Mahugh was working directly with Sandman in joint command on the Wedge Canyon Fire in the upper North Fork drainage. While Sandman directed federal firefighters in the forest, Mahugh coordinated fire engines for structure protection.

"It's not like you are joined at the hip, but there is coordination," Mahugh said. "We knew what they were doing, and he [Sandman] knew what we were doing."

Perhaps the most important factor in Flathead County fire preparedness is the remarkable success rate in stopping fires before they have a chance to get big. Initial attack efforts on the part of the Flathead National Forest, the DNRC and the county's rural fire districts are successful more than 97 percent of the time.

But in a busy fire year, with hundreds of starts, that high success rate still translates to several escaped fires.

The big fires in recent years have mostly emerged far enough from homes to provide time for evacuations. But that may not always be the case.

There will someday be a fire that is blowing through a subdivision in a couple of hours, or even minutes, Mahugh warns.

"The fires that are going to get us are the ones that start in a draw in one of these areas like Many Lakes or Echo Lake."

Relentless development in forested areas around the Flathead has exponentially complicated fire protection prospects. Some subdivisions have one way in, one way out. Some have heavy fuel loading.

And the increased occupation of forested areas presents another vexing problem: It actually increases the potential for fires started by people.

Every summer, Mahugh said, there are many instances of rural homeowners burning debris or using fireworks, even after restrictions have been imposed on such activities. Someday, those types of activities will spark a big fire in one of the Flathead's most populated forest areas, Mahugh predicts.

Two years ago, county fire officials developed a detailed wildfire fuels reduction mitigation plan with the help of the Resource Development Council.

The plan prioritized areas where disastrous wildfires are most likely, and the list is not entirely surprising, especially to fire chiefs: the populated areas between Many Lakes and Echo Lake; Big Mountain; and the multiple draws west of Kalispell, including Haywire Gulch, Truman Creek, Browns Meadow and McMannamy Draw.

The plan was developed not for firefighting, but for fire districts or other entities, such as homeowner associations, to pursue funding for fuel reduction work.

And that is another area where the Flathead has excelled in its fire preparedness. "Fuel reduction" for "defensible space" in the "wildland urban interface" were terms that didn't have much of a profile in the late 1990s. But the historic fire seasons of 2000, 2001 and 2003 brought about federal and state funding and concerted efforts among the Forest Service, state land managers and fire districts to reduce fire fuels in and around developed areas.

There have been multiple projects in the Flathead over the last six years, including some pursued by homeowners associations.

And that's how it should be, as Mahugh sees it.

"Really, we need the entire community or subdivision to undertake these defensive measures," he said, noting that one property owner's efforts may not help if his neighbors do nothing to make their land more defensible.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com