Follow up on the fire

Just to close out yesterday's story about the woods fire, as night fell the temperatures on Elk Mountain dropped into the 30s and the humidity rose to 45%, a combination that helped the fire go to sleep for the night.  By that time, a fireline had been dug with bulldozers and hand tool crews completely around the perimeter of the fire and the fire was allowed to burn itself out.

Many firefighters were involved in the effort, including 7 stations from Buncombe County and 3 stations from Asheville city.  (Several other county stations were also called to backfill the Reems Creek station.)  A large number of wildland firefighters from the N.C. Forest Service also responded.  Some of the special assets that were called included a state police helicopter that circled until the fire was contained.  The ground crews were having trouble seeing which directions the fire was spreading because of the large amount of smoke, but the helicopter crew was able to tell the crews where the fire was headed and which houses were in danger. The Forest Service also brought in bulldozers to plow a fire line across the ridge top to keep the fire from blowing over to the other side on the mountain.  Crews using rakes and chain saws worked the left and right flanks of the fire to clear fire lines to keep the fire from moving laterally. Engines were also sent to each of the threatened houses to clear perimeters around the homes. Those crews were also prepared to coat the houses in fire resistant foam if the fire moved their way.  In the end, the fire was stopped by the fire lines before it got to the houses.  The terrain was very steep and rugged, posing extra risks for the crews working the lines.  Buncombe County EMS deployed their special ops medic team, trained and equipped with special climbing gear and back-pack carried medical supplies, up near the fire lines, but fortunately they had no firefighter injuries to treat.

Luckily for Norris, he arrived a little late to the party, but was assigned the job of helping to establish the incident command post.  Buncombe County sent one of their command buses to the site to house the incident command team and Norris was assigned the job of establishing the communications nets.  Separate radio nets were set up for the structure protection units and for the fire line units. Complicating the communications problems were the combination of city, county, and state resources, all using separate radio systems.   Except for the Forest Service crews, all the Buncombe and Asheville units were cleared from the scene before 10pm.  The Forest Service crews were back on the scene this morning doing mop up.

Here are some links to TV stories related to the fire.  The first story covers the Wednesday fire:
7 acre wood fire

The video was taken fairly early in the fire before it reached its full size, but you can see that several large homes were not far above the fire.

This second video was done today following yet another woods fire in our area (which really isn't mentioned much in the story).  It features some footage of the Reems Creek FD and some brief comments from the chief about the dangers of burning when the temperatures are warm and the ground cover is so dry.
fire danger from dry conditions

This would have been a more interesting blog post if Norris had been able to take some pictures of his own, but things were pretty busy for him until later in the evening when it had gotten dark and pictures wouldn't have turned out very well.