Winds hampering efforts to fight Stickpin fire

Staging these additional resources in place before any escalation of response allows crews to familiarize themselves with the area and allows more time for situational awareness and safety planning.

That has fire officials on the defensive, and attempting to push the blaze into safer terrain that has already been burned by large fires in previous years, thus reducing the amount of fuel there now.

The fire has been exhibiting Rank 2 behaviour today, meaning a “low, vigour surface fire”, but Pepper said she didn’t know how much the fire had grown on the northeastern side yet.

“The Catch-22 is that we have green vegetation between us and the fire”, said Surber.

That money isn’t spent on forest thinning and other fire prevention projects.

The problem, Oregon Sen.

“They did an awesome job”, said Dan Derby, emergency coordinator, Regional District of the Kootenay-Boundary. Wyden said federal government funding to fight fires is a broke, dysfunctional mess.

Washington National Guard firefighters work to contain a wildfire near Lake Chelan, Wash., August 27, 2015. In all, a total of 274 firefighters have been tasked to the entire fire.

The alert was issued because of strong winds in the region.

“We are expecting windy conditions the next couple of days. however, the incident management team managing the fire has not expressed that in particular as a concern.”

The fires were 12 percent contained as of Friday morning, down from 17 percent on Thursday. Officials say the number of homes destroyed by the blaze remains at 39.

Local crews got help late Wednesday when engines arrived from elsewhere in Oregon.

The fire erupted Thursday in Chiniak (chihn-ee-AHK’), which is about 10 miles southeast of Kodiak on the easternmost point of Kodiak Island. There also was no immediately reliable estimate for its size, Kodiak City Manager Aimee Kniaziowski told the station.

Firefighters cut down trees and turned on sprinklers Friday after authorities emptied the community of Essex and turned back traffic where a wildfire had spread close to a highway along the southern edge of Glacier National Park.