Immediate Response Credited With Taming 'Highway 1 Fire' in Ely

ELY, Minn. -- An inch of rain overnight Saturday, May 19, helped deal near-final blows to a wildfire that burned up to the city limits last week, bringing relief to this town on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

The "Highway 1 Fire" of 2012 could have been known as the fire that burned this place to the ground.

That's not an overstatement, according to firefighters and local officials, who credit an "immediate" response by personnel and equipment -- including aircraft fortuitously stationed next door -- with preventing total disaster.

The residents seem to know it as well, and few seemed untouched by the fire that, in the end, claimed only two tin sheds, a hunting shack, one pole on the edge of one house's porch and no human injuries.

"THANK YOU FIREFIGHTERS!!" read signs hung on the windows of Steger Mukluk Co. downtown. The signs were made for the crews fighting last year's Pagami Creek Fire, but the store brought them back out after the chaos had settled Thursday.

"We could see the smoke and hear all the sirens, and the planes were right over the buildings," said Bonnie Cooley, a sales clerk in the store. Like almost anyone you talk to here who doesn't live in the stretch of homes evacuated from the southern end of town, she has close friends who were forced to evacuate.

The fire began about 1:45 p.m., Thursday, and Gene Wolter and Jamie Moore were there to see it. The pair are facilities engineers with the National Weather

Service, and were installing a new NOAA Weather Radio transmitter at the base of a radio tower just off Minnesota Highway 1 a little over a mile south of Ely city limits.

"We heard this cracking sound, like splintering wood," said Moore, of Kansas City, Mo. "I thought a car hit a telephone pole." Wolter and Moore turned around and saw a power transmission line lying on the ground. It was sparking and creating a line of fire in the undergrowth. It's not clear what caused the transmission line to come down; the fire remains under investigation. One witness told the Duluth News-Tribune he saw a vehicle drive over the line that had fallen across Minnesota 1 and that sent up sparks that ignited flames.

Regardless, conditions were ripe for a wildfire. The state's far northeast remains under moderate to severe drought, and temperatures had soared to near 90 degrees.

"We watched it go up," Wolter said Saturday of the flames as he and Moore were back at work in their installation. "It climbed the ladder up to the crowns just like that."

Wolter, who has 37 years of experience as a firefighter for the Aberdeen Rural Fire Department in South Dakota, was referring to the classic method a ground fire becomes a forest fire: Flames "climb the ladder" of short, dry trees like firs and spruces and then reach into the crowns of taller red, white and jack pines, where winds fan it and spread it from tree to tree. "I said to Jamie 'We gotta go and we gotta go now.' " The flames were just south of them, the wind was from the south, and the dirt road away from their location was right through them.

"Three minutes -- maybe five max," Wolter said. "That's how fast it all happened. Then it was a wall of fire." The two hopped in their truck and sped through the flames, which were on either side of the road, to safety.

Around that time, Thomas Erchull, an employee with the St. Louis County Highway Department, was driving his dump truck south on Highway 1 and saw flames to his right.

"I watched it get up right into the crowns, and I thought, 'Oh no, this is going right into Ely,' " he said. That wasn't a layman's assessment; Erchull is also the fire chief for Ely's volunteer fire department. He knew the conditions, watched as southerly winds gusting above 30 mph pushed the fire from crown to crown, and quickly calculated there wasn't much time -- perhaps a matter of minutes -- before several houses would be engulfed -- and soon after, the thickly settled edge of the city, consisting of older, wood-sided homes, his own included.

It's unclear who actually "called in" the fire first. One resident close by called 911, as did Wolter and Moore, and a fire surveillance plane from the U.S. Forest Service was flying overhead and spotted smoke almost immediately. All Erchull knows was in a matter of what seemed like seconds, his cell phone and radio lit up, and some amount of chaos ensued.

He called all his engines in, assigning each to a single home of the scattering of homes in the vicinity. "Each engine took one home, and that was their area to defend," he said. "And it burned right up around the houses." Erchull said he's convinced that were it not for those firefighters -- both from his department and Morris Township -- those homes would have been lost.

But the real saviors were the aircraft.

The notion of attacking an advancing forest fire by air in a rural community within minutes of detection might seem a stretch for those in metropolitan areas. But during fire season in the north country, crews are on-call and never more than a few hundred feet from their aircraft. A response time of more than five minutes is considered unacceptable, according to fire officials.

And three were stationed at the Ely Municipal Airport, a few miles south of the fire. In less than five minutes, they were picking up water from local ponds and dumping it on the fire's leading edge. In rapid succession after that, two pairs of water-scooping CL-215 planes, one pair from Bemidji and the other from Hibbing, were making what became the afternoon's milk run: swoop in to Shagawa Lake, scoop up a fuselage full of water, fly just over the rooftops of Ely, and dump the payload on the fire or ahead of it.

"It was amazing, and it was a nonstop, intense operation," said Mark Van Every, the district ranger for the Forest Service's Kawishiwi Ranger District. Van Every said he watched the fire-suppression operation from his office -- and was updated on evacuation progress by his wife; their house was among a number on the southeast part of town ordered to evacuate. Flames made it to within a quarter mile of those homes.

Both Van Every and Erchull said if the fire had spread to those homes, it would have been much harder to contain.

"Those houses would have provided fuel and heat, and the fire would have kept spreading," Van Every said. "It really wasn't until 5 or 6 p.m. that we felt the town would be OK. The volunteers and the aircraft are the reason this wasn't much much worse."

McClatchy-Tribune News Service