Hundreds of acres burn inside Forestry building

The call came into Division of Forestry dispatch at 3:55 p.m. Wednesday: fire burning in the woods at the end of Sunset Avenue in Houston.

In 15 minutes there would be two more forest fires reported in different parts of the Valley. Forestry resources were quickly stretched thin. Dispatchers worked to sort out all three incidents and get people and equipment to the right places.

If you managed not to glance out the window and notice it was still wintertime, you may have been able to convince yourself you were watching an exceedingly busy day at the height of fire season.

But it was all make believe.

“People sometimes wonder why we practice when there’s still snow on the ground,” said Mat-Su Area Forester Ken Bullman. “It’s not like a car, when you turn the switch you’re ready to go.”

In other words: It might not seem like fire season is just around the corner. But it is.

Bob Crowe, the forestry technician who set up and ran Wednesday’s exercise, said this year’s fire season might be a busy one. Meteorologists are predicting a warmer summer than last year.

Forestry doesn’t generally start running out to fires until April 1. That’s also when the division starts enforcing burn permits. But this week was the start of its yearly training. Soon they’ll be handing out hardhats and fire-resistant shirts. They’re gearing up for the season.

Toward that, Crowe spent hours this week in the Forestry warehouse at the Palmer Airport stringing out yards upon yards of yarn and taping it to the floor. Brown lines represented roads. Blue circles were lakes. And there were red strands to designate fires.

Along the brown strands were squares of cardboard with captions on the back designating one a home and another a gas station.

Crowe said the exercise is set up just like a type the military uses. It’s not something Forestry has done before. Over the winter, Crowe went to Missoula, Mont., to learn dozens of simulation techniques. This one in particular stood out to him as one he felt he needed to bring back to Alaska.

Bullman agreed, saying that in the past exercises were done with radios and photographs. Occasionally they’d break out a table-style sandbox.

Those were good but, “it’s kind of constricting because it’s so small,” Bullman said.

Crowe’s “tiny town,” by contrast, took up much of the large warehouse’s floor space.

For dispatchers, at least, the exercise started when a call came over their radios alerting them to the Sunset Avenue fire. Dispatchers checked maps and decided which crews to send where.

Soon, an imaginary crew was on the way to the first fire radioed in to say they’d spotted a second fire just as large. This one was on Kay Lake.

Then a call came in over the phone, rather than the radio. The caller alerted dispatch to a third fire off Settlers Bay Drive about the size of a football field.

As the hour-long exercise wore on, that fire would become the largest of the three.

Later, Crowe said that all three mock blazes were patterned on actual fires forestry has fought.

The one on Settlers Bay represented a fire in 2006 that burned hundreds of acres in the Point MacKenzie area. Crowe said that one in particular brought back some memories for him.

The fire on Sunset Avenue was one the division fought a day prior to the Point MacKenzie fire. The Kay Lake fire represented one in a different area of the Valley, farther north on Wendt Road.

Some lessons were learned along the way. Participants were reminded to make sure they get terminology right when speaking over the radios. They were reminded that Alaska State Troopers can be very useful when homes are threatened and residents need to be notified.

Still, most involved agreed the exercise went well. Bullman told the group afterwards that they, “basically were doing everything by the numbers.”

Norm McDonald, another Forestry higher-up, added, “it’s good to be back in kind of the hot seat.”