KMXT 100.1 FM Public Radio in Kodiak, Alaska
City manager and Kodiak emergency services director, Aimée Kniaziowski, speaks at podium at Chiniak fire press conference. Chief Mullican stands second from left. Kayla Desroches/KMXT
Kayla Desroches/KMXT
While Kodiak residents can no longer see the Twin Creeks fire from the city limits, it is still active and in the process of being contained.
At a press conference Tuesday afternoon, representatives from the firefighting effort and emergency services summarized events up until this point and announced the transition of the command to the State Division of Forestry.
Kodiak Fire Chief and Emergency Services Coordinator, Jim Mullican, said they received a report of the fire originating in the Twin Creeks area at about 9:30 p.m last Thursday. He said the blaze spread quickly, with flame heights reported to be between 80 to 130 feet.
“It was very obvious at that point that this fire was far larger than anything that we could possibly deal with, which puts it in firefighting terms into what we call a defensive posture. Life safety is number one. We need to take care of people first, deal with everything secondary from there. So all decision from there were made with that in mind.”
He said they got a sense of the fire’s boundaries and coverage on Friday morning during an overflight with the Coast guard.
“And at the time, basic estimates were 2000 acres. It’s obviously grown since then. But it was very obvious from that overflight that some astounding facts came out. One, the simple fact that a large majority of the structures out in Chiniak were untouched. And that was just something for me personally absolutely surprised me. With the size of the fire and what we were looking at, that we had so many structures that we untouched.”
According to the map of the fire’s reach, the fire burned down the library in Chiniak and Trespass Cabin on Lesnoi land, as well as one residence, but Mullican says the fire left 74 other structures untouched.
Map of fire’s boundaries. Kayla Dersoches/KMXT
“It is so varied out there that this fire literally was traveling from one ridge top, jumping across to the next one, and then it would jump to the tops of trees and just kept on burning extremely fast, so although the wind hurt us in one regard, it also kinda helped us a little bit ‘cause it pushed the fire very quickly through some of these areas, allowing it essentially to skip the real deep burn areas and get away from the houses.”
He said some of the logging roads also contributed to stopping or slowing flame spread.
State Division of Forestry information officer, Jim Schwarber, said state crews are now on-site fighting the fire.
“There’s been a smooth transition between the local operations and the Division of Forestry, who’s the lead agency responsible for responding to wild land fire in this part of the state. There’s about 90 firefighters working under the incident commander. There’s two type II crews and one type II initial attack crew, the Yukon Crew, that came in yesterday via ferry from Homer.”
He said there’s been no growth in the fire perimeter or size over the past two or three days.
“Due to the winds, today’s the first day that we expect to be able to get an aircraft up or a helicopter, and we intend to fly a perimeter of the fire today and get that map, so we’ll have new information… accurate information on the exact size of the fire. The fire activity that we have been able to monitor from the ground has been limited to basically smoldering and the heavier fuels, but there hasn’t been active fire on the surface at this time.”
According to a press release, the fire covers almost 5,300 acres and Wednesday, Schwarber said crews had reached 30 percent containment, up from 20 percent Tuesday and 10 percent Monday.
