A fire that has burned 3,100 acres of grass and timber and destroyed four buildings including two homes in Stillwater County was human-caused.
Fire Information Officer Jack de Golia said Wednesday he had no details on how the Saunders Fire was ignited, but received word from the Stillwater County Sheriff’s Office that human activity was responsible and that the investigation is continuing.
Stillwater County Sheriff Cliff Brophy was not immediately available for additional information.
De Golia reported Wednesday morning that cooler temperatures and cloud cover had helped calm the fire, but that a weak storm front moving in this morning could change the situation.
In addition to the two homes burned in the blaze, a homesteader cabin and an unoccupied house were incinerated. Bob and Bonnie Lorash, who lived on the east end of the Yellowstone River Ranch subdivision, lost their house and all their belongings to the fire Monday night.
Crews will be working near the Yellowstone River on Wednesday. Elsewhere, they will continue cooling the fire and building fire line.
The biggest factor for crews battling the Saunders fire is the weather and how much work firefighters made strengthening, and building, fire line, said Dan Bushnell with the state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation.
“Obviously, it’s going to be significant,” Bushnell said of the forecast for strong winds. But the goal is to get as much work done as possible, before any winds kick in, to keep the blaze within the fire line, he said.
An informational public meeting is set for 7 tonight in the Columbus city hall.
On Tuesday, the mounting expense of the firefighting effort prompted Stillwater County commissioners to declare the fire a disaster and ask the governor’s office to do the same. The state, in turn, submitted a request for a fire management assistance declaration for the fire.
“We expect this to exhaust the funds we have for these kinds of emergency services,” said Ken Mesch, Stillwater County disaster and emergency services coordinator. “It takes an amazing amount of money to keep this up and running.”
FEMA’s Director of Recovery determined that the blaze threatened such destruction that it qualifies as a major disaster and approved the state’s request late Tuesday.
Officials said 110 residences in the Yellowstone River Ranch and Countryman Creek Ranch subdivisions were evacuated Monday, and some residents of the Hearts n Diamonds II subdivision were ordered to evacuate on Tuesday.
It was unclear how many people heeded the warning. Residents of one of the subdivisions were allowed to return Tuesday night but asked to be out again by late Wednesday morning because of the weather forecast, Bushnell said.
Pat McKelvey, another fire information officer, said late Tuesday that four houses were confirmed destroyed but that two of them appeared to be abandoned. One, for example, was an old homestead cabin, according to a fire fact sheet.
An information officer had earlier provided different figures for the number of structures destroyed. McKelvey said late Tuesday he couldn’t confirm more than four.
Despite a creep in acreage late Tuesday — up from the 2,850 acres estimated earlier in the day — fire officials said there were signs crews were making gains.
Fire lines had been strengthened and joined in several areas, they said, and the blaze was believed to be about 20 percent contained as of Tuesday night.
“They had a good day, and they did get a lot of work done on the lines, but this is still a very dangerous fire,” McKelvey said.
No one stayed at a shelter set up Monday night and Tuesday at Columbus, said Paige Miller of the Red Cross of Montana.
The region is dry: The U.S. Drought Monitor, which tracks drought conditions nationally, last week showed bands of severe drought, lesser-severity moderate drought and abnormally dry conditions in southern and south-central Montana. That area includes Columbus.
Restrictions limiting campfires to designated, developed sites and smoking to areas clear of flammable materials, such as trees, are set to take effect across the region Friday, said Lisa Osborn, fire restrictions coordinator for local, state and federal agencies in the Billings area. The affected counties are Big Horn, Carbon, Musselshell, Stillwater, Sweet Grass, Treasure and Yellowstone. Portions of the Custer and Gallatin national forests, however, are not as dry and not affected by the restrictions, she said.
Although the winds Tuesday were not as strong as the 45 mph gusts that pushed the fire Monday, the blaze continued its march to the north, jumping to the north side of the Yellowstone River at several points Monday night. Maps issued by the incident management team Tuesday afternoon showed the perimeter of the fire on the north side of the river, and as the evening wore on flash points flared throughout the wooded area south of Interstate 90.
A clerk at the Super 8 Motel in Columbus said about 20 evacuated families stayed at the motel Monday, and she was expecting to see more Tuesday night.
Mike and Melissa Ruger and their 3-year-old daughter, Anise, evacuated their house southeast of the fire about 5:20 p.m. Monday. Mike Ruger, like others who witnessed the fire, said high winds seemed to blow the fire up all at once, catching residents off-guard. The Rugers had just five minutes to round up what they could on their way out.
“It’s amazing the amount of things you forget to grab,” Melissa Ruger said.
The Rugers got their dog out, but didn’t stop for their 50-pound bag of dog food. When Mike Ruger tried to go back for it Tuesday, he was stopped at a roadblock.
“They were letting people in for heart medication and stuff,” he said. “Dog food wasn’t cutting it.”
Another fire information officer, Karen Semple, confirmed that people who needed to get their animals or medication were being allowed in Tuesday morning, when the winds were mild.
Mike Ruger said he and his wife and daughter — their 8-year-old son is visiting his grandparents in Indiana — spent the night at the Super 8 “with a lot of our neighbors.”
Also at the Super 8 were Bruce and Betty Smith, seven-year residents of a house on Granite Peak Road in the Yellowstone River Ranch subdivision.
“It’s still there. We saw it about 11 or 11:15,” Betty Smith said of her home Tuesday afternoon. She and her husband evacuated their house about 5 p.m. Monday with nothing but some clothing and their four cats.
Steve Gose, who has owned the Eagles Nest Ranch for two years, said he was on his other ranch between Boyd and Red Lodge when the Saunders fire exploded Monday. He raced to the Eagles Nest, bringing a bulldozer and other equipment to help fight the fire. The fire jumped the river to his ranch at several points, but the spot fires were extinguished.
Gose said “a neighbor I’d never met” called and offered to put Gose’s horses at his ranch in Absarokee, which he did. “A lot of good people are fighting this thing,” Gose said.
Helicopter crews were using the Eagles Nest for a staging area Tuesday afternoon. As Gose and others hauled away hay bales on semitrailers, two Huey 210 helicopters with collapsible water buckets made numerous passes, dropping down just over the river to fill their buckets, then soaring up to drop them on hot spots on the ridges across the river.
At one point, both Hueys were hitting the same hot spot high on a ridge, circling from ridgetop to river and back again, each one completing the rotation in barely a minute and 15 seconds.
McKelvey said crews on last week’s Park City complex of fires learned the ground in the area is so dry that dumping water on the fire is not enough. The water quickly dried out and the fire flared up again, he said. As a result, the helicopters were injecting foam into the buckets of water Tuesday. The special foam allows the water to hold better to the soil.
Management of the fire was handed over Monday evening to the Type 2 incident management team that supervised the Park City complex of fires. About 300 personnel were on scene by Tuesday night, and the expense of the effort was estimated at $200,000, McKelvey said.
Local volunteer fire departments, Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation have crews on the blaze.
Gazette reporters Lance Benzel, Ed Kemmick, Lorna Thackeray, Linda Halstead-Acharya and Becky Shay contributed to this story.
Published on Wednesday, July 12, 2006. Last modified on 7/12/2006 at 11:55 am
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