Busy start to fire season

MAT-SU — From now until probably mid-May, warm weather and a lack of snow brings with it the necessity of making certain outdoor plans involving fire are safe.

Norm McDonald with the state Division of Forestry in Palmer said his crews are gearing up for another wildfire season in the Valley and across Alaska, and engines have already taken to the road. The department’s aircraft will soon take to the sky. The helicopters will start on Monday.

“With the ice on the lakes, you can’t use the buckets anyway,” McDonald said about fighting wildfire by air.

As far as activity goes, this year’s fire season is off to a quick start.

“It really started picking up this weekend as far as fires,” McDonald said. “Things are drying out and definitely catching people off guard.”

He said he’s heard of two so far — one in Palmer and one in Wasilla — in which a lawn’s worth of burning grass — at least one touched off intentionally — ended up spreading to a structure.

“From now through about end of May, first part of June, this is when things in the Valley here are most dangerous,” McDonald said.

In Palmer, fire chief John McNutt said the season seems to have come on quickly this year. He was out of town most of last weekend, but was back in time to help fight a brushfire Sunday. He said as of midday Monday he hadn’t had time to get caught up on what the department had done over the weekend, but he knew the Sunday fire wasn’t the only one.

“The winter was so bad that everybody’s getting out and enjoying it, it has snuck up on most of the residents,” McNutt said. “The fire department, luckily, we’ve been gearing up for it.”

Next week, he said, local firefighters will be setting a field on fire to drill on wildland firefighting.

Further north in the Mat-Su Borough, Bill Gamble, chief of the West Lakes Fire Department on the other side of Wasilla, said his season hasn’t quite started yet, but he’s not surprised to hear his neighbors are already busy fighting grass fires.

“They normally start over there in the Butte/Palmer area and then they start moving west,” he said.

The state website that tracks fires has reported five wildfires and two false alarms in the Valley since Thursday. The largest was a 3.2-acre blaze at Mile 3.2 of Point MacKenzie Road. The database says it was human-caused and smoldering when firefighters arrived on Sunday.

Forestry has written four citations and issued a warning relating to fires, according to those reports. McDonald said anyone burning debris now will need a burn permit. Smaller blazes — the largest allowed being a pile 10 feet square and 4 feet high — can be permitted online at forestry’s website. As long as you print the permit out, have it with you and follow the advice printed on it you’re fine.

“For the larger permits you need to call in here and we’ll have a site,” McDonald said.

For more information, or to get a burn permit call 761-6313.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.