Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Rain at the end of the week and mild weather over the weekend meant it was time to go home for firefighters on the Middle Fork Fire.
“We still have smokes in the unit with crews actively working on them,” Sweet Home Unit Forester Kevin Crowell said during Friday’s rain.
Monday, four inmate crews were still working, Crowell said. Those would be released to their camps on Tuesday, and the Sweet Home Unit was taking over the fire and retaining two 10-man inmate crews from Shutter Creek Forest Camp near Coos Bay.
“We still have some smokes out there,” Crowell said, and these crews will monitor them.
They’ll work on pulling up hose lays and equipment, Crowell said. “It’s the final stages of the fire right now, keeping smokes from the edges and making sure it’s in a safe mode for east winds to hit it.”
The crews also will work on rehabilitating the fire trails, making sure rain runs off the paths instead of down the paths, preventing erosion. In some areas they will spread straw and seed some grass. They finished pulling hose lays off the Boulder Creek Fire, a 75-acre fire in August.
Hose lays were left to deal with fires springing up inside the fire again.
“We’re confident with enough rain that we got things are wet underneath (the canopy),” Crowell said. “We’re not going to get a fire moving around so easily in there, (but) we’ll have crews around as long as we need them.”
The rain “helps dampen things down,” he said. Around the area on Friday, the industrial fire precaution level was reduced to level two, which “gets loggers back to work” and “gets firefighters a chance to sleep. We’ve been going since Paddock Lane (in May). It’s been a busy year this year.”
The rain brings the danger down, bringing up moisture levels in surface fuels, Crowell said. But heat can remain trapped inside holes and stumps.
The Middle Fork Fire burned 1,070 acres around Rocky Top on the peninsula between the Santiam Middle and the Quartzville arms of Green Peter Reservoir, approximately 14 miles northeast of Sweet Home. It started on Sept. 8.