17 Mile East End Road Fire

McNeil Canyon Elementary School Parking Lot: Staging Area for Fire Crews

Close your eyes. Visualize my face. Eyes rolled up toward the ceiling. Head shaking back and forth. What would cause me to have this kind of amazed, sarcastic, disbelief? Hearing the latest Redoubt Volcano Eruption update immediately following the 17 Mile East End Road fire update.

No, fortunately the volcano is not erupting.

I am sure that many loyal readers of this blog who live in distant lands can not imagine how, after only two weeks since seeing pictures on this blog of enormous amounts of snow, our state could be in the midst of a severe fire season. I am sure that it would never cross some peoples minds to lump Alaska into the same fire hazard mound as you would put Southern California. (In fact, I imagine that extremely loyal readers remember a blog posting one year ago about how it was hailing and I was more than slightly annoyed.)

Let me take a few paragraphs to explain.

McNeil Canyon Fire Hall

There are a couple factors that I can tell you about which lead to this dangerous situation. 15 years ago our neighborhood was tucked into a forest of spruce trees. The trees were beautiful, tall and healthy. This forest was much different than other forests I hiked through as a youth; the spruce have branches that grow all the way to the forest floor. These low branches are thin and poke like needles. The trees are growing tightly next to each other. Take this description to mean that these forests were not necessarily ones that you could hike through if you wanted to.

Vince and me snowshoeing with Emily Ward in the pre-spruce bark beetle days

The view of the sea and Kenai mountain range was obscured from most of our homes. Many people had homes with trails cut through the forest from their parking pads at the road to their homes. The neighborhood was not densely populated then. People usually had built their homes on multi-acre lots. It was quiet and beautiful.

Then the spruce bark beetle infestation began to spread. It was hard to believe at first that we should be thinning the forest, or spraying the trees, or just clearing the land to sell the trees while they were still healthy. A big part of the community was in denial (including myself). Vince and I were not in a position to have to make those kinds of tough choices at the time, as we were not landowners and being childless, mortgage less, and young we chose to take a hiatus and head to Saipan for a while.

Crappy picture of a typical East End Road View in the pre-spruce bark beetle days

When we returned from Saipan we were shocked! The trees had all died. The view of Kachemak Bay and the glaciers beyond was visible nearly the entire stretch of East End Road. Large swaths of dead trees were being cleared by land owners.

Areas that were not being cleared were frightening places during winter storms. I remember one night in late January in a small cabin we were renting. There was a fierce wind storm blowing across the inlet and up the bay. Falcom was asleep in his crib. I was laying beside him in my bed and Vince was on the phone with Valda to see if we could come to her place to sleep as trees were snapping like matchsticks all around us. Crack! Smash! Crack! It was a long night.

At this same time, land owners were subdividing and cashing in on their newly emerging views. Investors from outside were riding that mortgage bubble and buying up this land to build their second homes or retirement homes. Ours is a dynamic neighborhood.

Getting back to how Homer Alaska could go from three foot snow berms to Extremely high fire danger in two weeks...

After the snow melts what is left is last years brown dry sedge grass and the standing and lying down remains of our spruce forest. The snow is gone, the ground is wet but everything above the ground is dry...extremely dry. Imagine making a campfire. The sedge grass is like a crumpled up newspaper. The dead spruce tree branches are the kindling, and the trunks are the wood.

You would not need to be Survivorman to stay warm in this forest. Two years ago we had the Caribou Hills Fire which was started by a spark that shot off the tip of a spade that someone was sharpening. This year it is a downed power line on some sedge grass.

Why this is so dangerous for our neighborhood is that we have only one road twisting up the bay to our community. It runs more than twenty miles and after mile 16 starts to feel very remote. It is a mixture of private and borough lands. At the end of the road are the Russian Old Believer villages. These are orthodox communities that keep themselves separate in order to preserve their faith system.

Wednesday, the fire was getting under control. Wednesday night the wind picked up and was gusting. The helicopters with their water buckets were back.

Thursday: The state Department of Forestry has upgraded our fire to grade 1 and we are now inundated with fire squads from all over the state.
Valda and Janet M. are at the fire hall helping to organize food distribution. The parking lot at McNeil Canyon Elementary school is next to the fire hall and is the staging area for the fight. It is full of fire engines. The playground behind the school is being filled up with tents for sleeping firefighters. If you are an owner of a bulldozer you are probably out cutting a fireline.

Inside the fire hall tables are set up with telephones and terrific volunteers are keeping food spread out like a buffet line while loading up boxes to be delivered out to the fire lines.

At school this morning the kids got to go on tours of fire trucks. Firemen were spreading out in the almost green grass all around the school yesterday afternoon waiting to be deployed. One single woman I know was more than a little impressed with all of the fit uniformed firemen lounging around in the afternoon sun. So, for all the Weight Watchers single gals, if you are looking for an excuse to bake a cake... (picture of firemen taken by a sneaky Willie)


The kids also have been baking cookies to take to the fire hall. Since we were in town yesterday delivering vegetable boxes, Valda dispatched us to pick up food and drink contributions from local merchants. We also filled up our truck with Gatorade and delivered it to the fire hall.

I just got a call from Suzanne. She is a teacher at Kachemak Selo School in the Old Believer Village. She rides a four wheeler each day down a switchback trail from the end of East End Road to the beach, where she travels to the secluded community. Yesterday, when the fire was smaller the district cancelled school. Today, school has not been cancelled. When I describe Suzanne to people and I tell them what she does I usually throw in the words, kick ass and macho. This morning when she called me she was scared. This is what she said:

It is like a war zone, miles and miles of black and burning forest. Smoke is everywhere. I think I saw one house burned down. I am scared and I can not believe that they have not cancelled school. The troopers stopped me and asked me what I'm doing and he said, "They didn't cancel school?" Seriously, there are firefighters everywhere. Seriously, this is very scary.

As for our family. It is a great relief to me knowing that the fire team is stationed between the fire and my house. Clouds are moving in and that should help with the suppression efforts. We have been blessed with many offers from friends and town neighbors to stay at their places should we need to be evacuated. It is good knowing that there are such strong friends around.

Please keep the members of the Old Believer Communities in your hearts, prayers, or whatever faith system you follow. They have chosen not to evacuate their villages and as we see from Suzanne's testimony, it is a dangerous place for them to be.

In non-fire related news, my knee is getting better each day. Falcom and Marina are only telling one out of every four people they meet about my car accident, down from four out of four...

The carnival is in town this weekend.

I Love You, Man is playing at the theater and I am hoping to have a date to it with DeeJay, who, when I mentioned this date, is afraid that I want to take him to a movie that is in the same theme as Brokeback Mountain. I find this amusing and am looking forward to shocking him.

Vince will be spending the weekend in Seward with his family where our cousin Chuck has taken a turn for the worse in his battle with brain cancer.

The life in the Greear Family. What a ride.