KITITTAS COUNTY, Wash. — June 9 was a birthday Jim Easterling will never forget, though it’s not the right reasons.
It will be the day his parents’ relatively new home burned down, despite his best efforts to save it.
“We started getting calls and texts that there was a fire out on Red Bridge Road right near my parents’ place,” Easterling said, " We peeled out and headed up on the hill.
A side-by-side off-highway vehicle got him, a couple of friends, and the wife of one of his friends up the ridge where his parents’ house sits.
There, a father and son had been using a garden hose and garden tools to try and save homes.
Jim and his friends grabbed rakes, shovels, and buckets to try and help.
“The wind was shifting around, it was crazy,” Easterling said.
It wasn’t enough.
Despite waiving down an airdrop to put water between the homes and the fire, the wind-driven flames were too much for the group to fight against.
Kittitas County Fire Chief Aaron Lowe doesn’t endorse vigilant firefighting, but Easterling says he had to.
He already feels enough regret knowing his parents’ house is a total loss.
“It’ll probably haunt me,” Easterling said, “That’s probably something that’s going to stick with me and I’ll be reeling from.”
Aaron Lowe says he understands, but the fire’s behavior yesterday was too intense not to take seriously.
“As a family member, I can understand,” Lowe said. “But what I don’t think people understand is the speed and intensity fire brings. This was a wind-driven fire....The speed at which those fires move can surprise even us.”
The fire behavior on Tuesday was something Lowe and Incident Manager Trainee Larry Leach had seldom seen in June.
Flames were climbing up to nine feet high, driven by a wind flowing up the drainage from south to north, pushing the fire up the hillsides
“It’s a little too early for my comfort to have a fire as significant as this this early in the season., ” Lowe said.
Typically, fires with explosive flames like this hold off to July. But a dry, warm spring made a below-average snowpack even more dire this time of year.
“We’ve been trying to do a lot of fire-wising and preparation because we didn’t get any showers in April and May.” Easterling said.
Fire-wise strategies could have helped this fire from getting worse, Leach says. He points to a street that was mitigated with DNR’s landowner partner program to lower the fuel load.
“The flame lines went from seven to nine feet right down to a foot, foot and a half, when it got into this fuel break work. That really allowed us to get in tight with the dozers and hand crews and stop the progress towards even more structures.” Leach said.
Leach says crews will continue to pick and dig out hot spots inside the 40-acre perimeter, hoping the wind subsides over the next several days.
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