A tiny, remote island off the coast of the Upper Peninsula has been smoldering with a fire for months — and now the flames threaten a historic, abandoned lighthouse after burning a quarter of the island’s landmass.
The fire has been crawling through Poverty Island, a 200-acre dot of land southeast of Escanaba, since late June after it likely started with a lightning strike, said Michael Fitzgibbon, a Wisconsin-based spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is handling the efforts to put out the fire.
But weather conditions and the island’s remoteness have made it difficult to extinguish.
The island is uninhabited, almost entirely covered with forest, and is frequented only by the occasional fishers and hunters who set up camp.
“Other than few deer and couple eagles, it doesn’t get much use,” Fitzgibbon said of the island. “There’s a lot of spiders out there for some reason, and big ones too.”
But the island does have a lighthouse, which was built in 1874 and then abandoned in 1957, according to Lighthouse Digest, which also decried a lack of preservation efforts to save the structure and in a 2011 article dubbed it the “most endangered lighthouse in the United States.”
In an effort to halt the fire, more than a dozen personnel have begun fighting fire with fire, control-burning 70 acres so that the fire fails to make a leap across a pre-determined line. Combined with those efforts, most of the island has either been burned or control-burned as a result of the fire.
Firefighters tried to extinguish the blaze soon after it started, but weren’t able to completely finish their work because stormy weather drove them back toward the mainland, Fitzgibbon said. The flames essentially hid out and smoldered in deep crevices before raging out in force again, provoked by winds.
Now the fire is only 20% contained, and has sent a thin column of smoke in the air that has been visible throughout nearby towns in the Upper Peninsula and northeast Wisconsin.
Still, this time firefighters are confident their efforts to stop the fire will hold. Various federal agencies have sent fires to battle the flames, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service.
“They feel pretty confident about the fire line they’ve established,” Fitzgibbon said. “They blackened that line out really well and that the fire will not cross the line again.”
Contact Daniel Bethencourt: [email protected]. Follow on Twitter @_dbethencourt. The Associated Press contributed reporting.
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