The Shenandoah National Park experienced its second largest forest fire in recorded history just six months ago. In the first of a two-part report, WMRA’s Jordy Yager looks at how fire teams fought the 10,000-acre blaze and what it means for the park’s future.
It was a typical Saturday afternoon when Matthew Way got the call.
MATTHEW WAY: There was a smoke report called into our dispatch center, said there was a fire in the park. Dispatch called me and then I responded down.
Way is the Assistant Fire Management Officer for Shenandoah National Park, which encompasses nearly 200,000 acres from Front Royal, all the way south to Waynesboro. For more than a dozen years, Way worked on the Augusta Hot Shot crew. So he’s seen his fair share of fires. But that Saturday in April, when he responded to the call for smoke, he was surprised.
WAY: The fire column was already three or four times the size of what I was anticipating. It was already in a slightly different spot than where it was reported, which tells me that it’s growing. It’s moving.
And move it did. By the end of the day, the fire had spread across 69 acres. A full 48 hours later, and it was burning through 2,100 acres.
SALLY HURLBERT: We still don’t know for sure what caused the fire, but pretty sure it’s human caused, most likely an escaped camp fire, somebody was probably camping out there, and had a fire, and didn’t put it out completely.
Sally Hurlbert is a Management Specialist with the Park. Standing at the Brown Mountain Overlook, near mile marker 75 along Skyline Drive, Hurlbert is pointing to a giant map of the valley below us. [Sound of map moving around.]
HURLBERT: So this is where the smoke was reported, and the first priority that day was to get people out of this area, who were hiking those trails.
Working with local law enforcement, Way says they got everyone to safety without incident. Then, he says, the hard part began. Every fire is different. And first thing’s first, he had to figure out what he was dealing with.
WAY: For me, I was already boots on the ground on the trail system, so I just walked up the trail until I hit the fire’s edge, and then started assessing it from there.
Not only was the fire larger than originally thought, but it was spreading faster, and it was 5 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. Resources, he says, were going to be hard to come by.
WAY: That Saturday night, we placed an order for a couple of Type 1 hand crews, some engines, some other miscellaneous positions that we immediately needed. And those orders were being filled from New Mexico. So that’s the closest available resource… So we have some Hot Shot crews here on the East Coast, but due to fire behavior, other fires in the area, they were committed, we couldn’t get a local crew until Monday.
In total, more than 350 fire fighters came from over 30 states to help battle the blaze. And while getting more crews on the scene more quickly would’ve helped, Way says it likely wouldn’t have made a significant difference, mainly because of the terrain.
It would become known as the Rocky Mount fire, and as the name suggests, much of the engulfed area consisted of loose rockslides on steep slopes surrounded by burning trees and leaf litter. Not the type of fire you want to rush into head on.
WAY: The more people you have, the more chances there are for someone to get injured, for something bad to happen, and committing a lot of resources into a piece of ground that is very remote, and very rocky, very steep, is not necessarily the best plan. It’s much easier to give up a little bit of ground, back up to favorable terrain, put your lines in place and then just do a light back burn to secure it. Versus trying to chase it down direct and putting people in a very bad position.
Thankfully a hurt knee and ankle were the only human injuries. Where they could, fire teams used existing hiking trails as natural buffers, attempting to halt the fire’s advance by using chainsaws to cut down trees and leaf blowers to remove brush that the fire could have used for fuel.
And where the terrain proved too treacherous, helicopters were brought in, dropping small flammable ping-pong balls to burn portions of the ground — again, in an attempt to use up the tree and brush fuel in the path of the rapidly spreading fire.
By April 29, the fire had spread over 10,300 acres, making it the second largest in the park’s 80 years of existence. But finally after nearly two weeks and $4 million, it was contained. And three weeks later, it was deemed officially out.
It’s been about six months since then, and as we sit in his giant pickup truck on Skyline Drive, Way points to the surrounding leaves that are beginning to fall from the trees. We’re entering into another fire season, he says.
WAY: For us we look at dryness, so we’re tracking days since rain, how much rain we’re getting out of each rainstorm, and trying to determine just how dry the woods are getting… We’ll be watching the weather pretty hard for the next two months.
JORDY YAGER: Praying for rain?
WAY: Yep, and snow. [Laughter]