Idaho on fire bigtime

[~LARGO~]

Hi All,

I noted E.D's post, Hoser Johns comment, so I looked on the incident webpage, found this fire, one of many in Idaho, called the Pony Complex. Complex meaning two fires have merged into one BIG fire.

http://inciweb.org/incident/3614/

The Pony Complex reportedly has taken several structures, as well as vast acreages of brush, and farmland, and is actively burning in the big timber nearing the small towns of Pine and Featherville, Idaho, which are neat little towns with many homes and cabins in the many millions of dollar values.

These towns have been evacuated, or are in the process of being evacuated now.

The speed of the fire now runs at 5-7 miles a day, which makes it such a particularly dangerous fire, and will impact fisheries on at least 2 major rivers, and prime habitat for deer, elk, etc.

Take a look at the size of the fire on the above I live near the airport in Boise, where the C-130 Hercules and other air attack aircraft refill their drop loads, and they are going and coming all day.

This is going to be a particularly bad fire year, as we have seen already, and it is a long time before any meaningful precipitation will impact the slowing of these fires.

Gary

[Au Seeker]

Wow Gary, that's a huge fire almost 144,000 acres!!!

[garimpo]

Gary hope your not in the direction the fire is moving.....

[Hoser John]

what's a fella a gonna do--besides run like the devil--bad year,actually a BAD century so far too-John

[~LARGO~]

Hi all,

I sent the same link I posted here about the Pony Complex fire to my son, who has 3 young boys, and my daughter, who has 3 children, all who went tent camping at a very nice campground in the mountains edged by the Boise River.

I wrote to them that I hoped that they took lots of photos of the place they went camping, as the area will never be the same in their lifetimes. That is the sad reality of fires, although I have noted that in the desert of northern Nevada, where rangefires have occurred, that the sagebrush and flowers are all coming back slowly with winter precipitation, and spring rains.

In the case of big timber, however, some of those trees are hundreds of years old, and their growth is incredibly slow.

The campground is actually just upstream a few miles from the small town of Featherville, which is now threatened by the advancing fire. It is the Baumgartner campground, for the curious, is well maintained, has a summer host on site to manage the camp.

Have a nice day!

Gary

[The Found Dutchman]

You guys stay safe up there.

[El Dorado]

Most of those big fires up there have to be put out by Mother Nature and fall rains and winter snow......

[~LARGO~]

Hi all,

you are spot on there, Steve, that is exactly what is being said now.

Most of those big fires up there have to be put out by Mother Nature and fall rains and winter snow...

We are quite safe here in the greater Treasure Valley, the closest timber is 20 miles away, on the mountain tops, but a good range fire or lightning strike could set that off anytime.

You guys in CA be careful!

Gary

[Gilaoro]

Gary, when I left Grimes Pass in 2010 we had been trapped for 5 days by a fire moving up the Mt toward the Payette River, there was another one burning on the Payette S of Garden Valley, they where escorting traffic S to the junction. Rocks and burning logs where falling on to the highway. Where we was at Charlotte Creek and Grimes Creek there was no way out except down Grimes Pass and I was driving a 33" motor home with a trailer with an ATV on it behind my Jeep Liberty, I was 65 feet long and I could not have got the MH down Grimes Pass anyway, we finally got out via Placerville. When we got to Garden Valley the HWP would not let me triple tow so my wife had to drive the Jeep and pull the trailer. She had a slight heart attack at the junction. Took her to Boise to the hospital and we spend a month at Caldwell with friends while she recovered. Driving through a forest fire is scary.

In the mid 1980's we where at the Fam camp at Mt Home AFB when the range burned all the way from Boise to way E of MT Home. it was so hot the bob-wire melted on the fences , they would have evacuated the base but there was no place to go. they plowed fire brakes around the base and fought hit hard on the west side at the ammo dumps, it went around he base and for miles on to the east

The last time we where there in 2010 the Sage brush was still very small compared to what it was before the fire.

Featherville is no place to be in a forest fire , that one winding road could be easily blocked by an accident, hope your son and his family get out safely. Where you in Boise when the old floating dredge burned in Featherville?

Max

[El Dorado]

It is really a bad year for this stuff....... that fire is giant. I was North of Salmon Falls last year during that monster fire and when the smoke started turning to embers wel left. A couple of hours later there were mandatory evacs. It took Mother nature to stop that one.......

[Bedrock Bob]

Sometimes they don't go out even after it turns cold. The Los Conchas fire ran 35 miles through the Jemez mountains and was 45,000 acres the first day. The only thing they could do was try to keep it from burning into LANL where all the nuclear waste and tests are. We had radiation monitors everywhere sampling the smoke. They drew a 300 mile perimeter line and basically let it burn. It was so hot the pyrocumuluos cloud formed over the old Jemez volcano for three months. The fire burned into winter and even under the snow. Stumps would collapse and start new smoke all the way into March the next year.

The floods afterward were more devastating than the fire. More expensive too. It washed out every road, every farm and silted up all the wells. It burned Bandoleir and the Vallez Caldera completely and burned every sqare inch of the Santa Ana reservation.They say it cost a billion dollars at Los Alamos Laboratories to protect, move and secure radioactive materials.

Despite all the destruction it was beautiful. From Santa Fe the entire horizon was on fire. The cloud over the old volcano looked just like an eruption. It had constant lightning in it and had to be 30 miles in diameter.

There is no calculating how much a fire like that causes in damage. All the crews in the west could not put it out and neither could mother nature.They concentrated all their resorces to save the labs and they were able to do that but the fire burned right up to the security fence on all sides! If that place had been consumed by fire they would have to evacuate a strip from Santa Fe to Dallas Texas!

The day it started we had 3% humidity, 60 m.p.h. winds and it was 92 degrees. That fire ran from Cochiti to Espanola in a matter of about 6 hours through big timber. It was the hottest and fastest moving fire on record. It burned 133,000 acres. There were about 2000 people displaced by the fire and about a zillion were evacuated. Everyone had some astro physicist as a guest in their home.

Since that fire we have had a couple that has dwarfed it by a large margin.

Edited August 17, 2013 by Bedrock Bob