Howie Kent, Fire Management Officer with Alaska Division of Forestry in Soldotna, spoke with KBBI's Kathleen Gustafson at nine this morning to update the status of the North Fork and Caribou Lake fires.
Transcription
Kent:
All right, let's start with the North Fork fire. So that fire, we've got dozer line around a hundred percent that fire. We're not calling it contained just yet because there's still some active fire within the perimeter.
That fire is currently a 59 acres and we're not expecting that fire to move anymore. We've got a crew of 20 going down this morning to marry up with the other folks that are on the fire we've. 21 other folks that are currently on that fire. I anticipate those those folks will be on that fire for the next day or so at least making sure that that is contained and not going to progress any further.
As far as the Caribou Lake Fire that fire is over a hundred acres.
A group of smokejumpers jumped the fire yesterday that's a group of eight individuals. We hired a dozer. The dozer arrived out there this morning at 5:00 a.m. And they're they're working to get some containment line started. The objective there is to protect the the structures that are in the area the there's some residences out there and some cabins.
So we're looking at doing some structure protection right off the bat there and anchoring and getting a good toehold on this fire and then we'll be working trying to get along the flanks at the same time. We're trying to get additional crews into the fire. Of course, we have the Swan Lake fire going on as well here.
It's got a lot of a lot of different moving parts and a lot of people are coming into. With that effort. So we're trying to utilize Crews and aircraft that are sign of that fire to assist with this fire down at Caribou lake.
So that's currently where we're at with the status. We're expecting to have West Winds today, which will push that fire to the east so people are going to see smoke column again know that we've got people there and we've got people continuing to head that direction will have Aviation assets over the fire today.
KBBI:
you're talking about this Caribou Lake Fire.
KENT:
Yes. Yeah, we'll have aviation and other firefighting resources heading that direction to the Caribou Lake Fire to work on that today. See if we can we can get that thing at least stopped. We are expecting some growth on it today though.
KBBI:
You are?
KENT:
Yep. Absolutely.
KBBI:
I thank you for your time.
KENT:
Yeah, no problem.
