Local firefighters grateful for late summer

PALMER — When it comes to the weather, the people charged with fighting wildfires are often the holders of some very unpopular opinions.

All summer, after all, they’re praying for rain on days when the rest of us are hoping for just one more day of sunshine.

This month is no exception. While winter-weary Alaskans are begging for summer to start, folks over at the Division of Forestry in Palmer say they are pleased the season is taking its sweet time.

“It is kind of nice having this late start,” said Norm McDonald, forestry management officer for the division.

He said it’s given crews time to train. Some years, when fire season starts early, fighting pretend fires in drills takes a backseat to fighting real fires in the field.

“Right now we’re kind of a little bit behind our usual schedule for fire starts,” McDonald said.

The daily briefing from the Alaska Interagency Coordination Center shows just one fire reported in the Mat-Su area to which forestry responded, and it was apparently contained quickly.

Forestry personnel, McDonald said, have even been able to work on things they’re often scrambling to find time for, like public information campaigns. They’re even trying to delay the contract for a firefighting helicopter for a week.

“We’re trying to hold off on bringing that contract on for a week because of the snow loading and because the lakes are still frozen,” McDonald said. “This is one of those late, strange years, the latest I can remember us having this much snow on the ground.”

This week his crews are running simulation drills. Folks might hear them on emergency band radio sometimes, pretending there’s a fire somewhere. There are also a lot of folks out in the parking lot going through the driver’s academy for various forestry apparatus.

“Right now we’ve got people down from every area in the sate from Kenai, Fairbanks, Copper River, Delta, Tok — they’re all dong their driver training here,” McDonald said Monday.

People also are training on maintenance and running water pumps, and folks are getting ready for the big fire retardant-dropping airplane.

“We’ve got our air tanker base class coming on, the guys that do the ramp work and the loading, they’re doing their refreshers,” McDonald said.

The two local hot-shot crews, the Pioneer Peak and Gannet Glacier teams, will be up and running May 1 and May 15 respectively. By then there should be some fires to fight, but if not, both teams are able to roll to national fire incidents.

And sometime soon, Forestry hopes to work with local volunteer fire departments on a controlled burn of a hayfield somewhere, likely at the Musk Ox Farm and then also somewhere in Big Lake.

“Just this past week I’ve been meeting with all of the chiefs from Mat-Su and Chugiak and Anchorage,” McDonald said.

The idea is to make sure everyone works together and “everyone knows who everyone is.”

That’s kind of the name of the game right now.

“We’re making sure that we’re all ready to go,” McDonald said.

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