Tipanuk evacuated when wildfire threatens homes

Residents of the rural community of Tipanuk were evacuated Friday night when a major range fire erupted west of the city at about 6 p.m., threatening the small community of about 300 people between Boise and Mountain Home.

Everyone involved in battling the blaze that eventually burned approximately 3,900 acres agreed that the call to evacuate, made by Bud Corbus who directed the response of the Mountain Home fire department, was appropriate.

Driven by high winds of between 30-35 mph, the fire quickly spread from its point of origin, expanding into a fire line nearly five miles wide as it moved toward Tipanuk.

"If it hadn't been for the rain," which began about 11 p.m. that night," it would have been an absolute disaster," Corbus said. "We had a lot of structures out there threatened."

Mountain Home's firefighters were called out by the BLM, which requested their assistance to aid BLM fire crews already on the scene. In addition fire crews and equipment from the Whitney Fire Protection District in Boise, Mountain Home AFB, the Boise National Forest, and the Oasis Fire Department (formed recently to protect the Tipanuk area), all had a hand in fighting the blaze. The BLM sent 10 full engines and their crews, plus some additional crews, and were supported by about 10 more firetrucks from the other departments.

The Mountain Home firemen had been responding to assist at a chain-reaction car wreck on I-84 (See story Page A-3) when the request for mutual aid came in from the BLM.

Eventually, a total of up to 150 firefighters took part in the effort to stop the blaze.

Although the fire, which began roughly near the foothills road east of Mayfield that runs up to Danskin Mountain, never got closer than about five miles to the sprawling community of Tipanuk, Corbus noted that "in that type of wind, five miles can disappear in five minutes."

While Corbus and Capt. Mike Barclay of the Elmore County Sheriff's Office set up a unified command post at the head of Ditto Road, Rick Van Meer directed the local firefighters' efforts at the fireline.

"It was really ugly, very smokey," Van Meer said. "It was so smokey going in that the air attack helicopter had to guide us in."

Van Meer and his team, which included three firefighting vehicles, were responsible for protecting the structures in the area along Rumsey Road. No structures were lost but two haystacks were destroyed.

Van Meer's team set a two-mile-long backfire along Rumsey Road to try and control the blaze, "but the wind blew (the fire) right over the road and our backfire. If we didn't get that rain, I don't know where we'd have stopped it."

While the local and BLM crews were fighting the fire, sheriff's deputies went door to door in the Tipanuk area, evacuating residents who were told to go to the high school, where the gym had been set up as a public shelter.

But while virtually the entire community of Tipanuk was evacuated, with almost all the citizens cooperating with authorities, only a small handful of people actually showed up at the gym.

"I guess people saw all those pictures from Katrina and decided to avoid any public shelter," one of the evacuees joked.

As the rain began to arrive at about 11 p.m. the evacuation order was lifted, but most people didn't return to their homes until early Saturday morning, either staying at the high school or with friends in town. BLM fire crews stayed on the fireline through most of Saturday to mop up any hot spots.

Authorities later determined that the fire was human caused, not sparked by some of the lighting that had occurred earlier in the day in the area.

"Some local residents had burned their trash in a burn barrel a few days ago, thought it was out, and dumped the barrel on their private property" about two or three days later, said Carrie Bilboa, fire investigator for the Boise District BLM.

But apparently, some items in the trash were still smoldering, and "when the wind picked up (Friday), it fanned the burned trash and caused sparks to fly into nearby grass and brush.

"That's all it took, just a small spark and the wind pushed the fire to hundreds of acres in a matter of minutes."

Bilboa remined people that "if you're burning trash, a campfire, or anything that could cause a wildfire, please make sure it's out before you leave it. Douse it with water and stir it until it is cold to the touch. That's the only way to be sure you won't cause a wildfire."

Despite cooler temperatures, heavy fuel loads on the desert and in the forests combined with still dry conditions have resulted in the fire danger remaining at a high level.

Although Mountain Home firemen helped fight the fire for about six hours, shortly after they returned to the station at about midnight, they were called out again to a fire on a power pole on Aguirre Road, which dropped the power line and caused a blackout in part of the town.

Then Sunday, they responded to a small brush fire at Mountain Home Reservoir that burned six acres after a controlled burn got out of control.

Combined with a lengthy Thursday-night effort to distribute smoke detectors in some of the trailer parks in the city, and being called out to a car on fire in the middle of that effort, "we've got a tired bunch of firefighters," Corbus said. "It was a long week."

Corbus said one of the things that helped considerably with the efforts to fight Friday's fire, officially named the Bown's Roost Fire, was the establishment of the unified command post to help coordinate all the disparate efforts that went into the evacuation and the firefighting. "We've trained to do that, and it worked very well. It helped a lot," he said.