Wildfire in BWCA grows; hot winds worry officials

08/08/2005

Chao Xiong,
Star Tribune
August 8, 2005

A wildfire in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness expanded to just over 1 square mile Sunday as more firefighters assembled to battle the expanding blaze.

The fire between Alpine and Seagull lakes, near the end of the Gunflint Trail, had been moving east and northeast—away from concentrations of tinder-dry trees blown down in a 1999 storm. But officials feared that wind could whip up flames today.

Fire crews from Ohio, Indiana, Missouri and West Virginia began arriving Sunday morning, and will be sent in to the Boundary Waters today, officials said. About 50 had assembled and another 30 were on their way.

The portage between the lakes was closed, as were all the campsites on Seagull.

“It’s not contained yet,” said Jean Bergerson, a fire information officer at the Minnesota Interagency Fire Center in Grand Rapids, Minn. “I expect it will go up some. How much depends on the weather.”

The fire was sparked by lightning and quickly spread to about 0.6 square miles Saturday night, she said. The fire is blocked to the south by Seagull Lake, she added.

So far, the fire has been fought mainly with two CL-215 water-scooping planes that each carry 1,400 gallons of water, said Patti Hines, information officer with the fire center. The planes dropped water on the fire every 2 minutes during daylight hours.

Today, the fire crews will use boats and canoes to reach the fire and begin fighting it by hand, Bergerson said. Motor restrictions on the lakes apply to firefighters, as they do to campers.

The National Weather Service predicted that northern Cook County would be partly cloudy today, with isolated showers and thunderstorms and a 20 percent chance of rain. Highs were predicted at 85 to 90, with winds increasing to 10 to 20 miles per hour.

Wind a factor

Authorities said the weekend’s high temperatures weren’t in their favor, but the wind Sunday was not as brisk as the day before.

“If you have a strong wind behind a fire, it can push it and it can burn a lot of acres quickly,” said Pete Heiden of the fire center. “[The fire] is not doing anything out of the ordinary for a fire like this.”

The fire is in a part of Superior National Forest where millions of trees were downed by straight-line winds on July 4, 1999. But the major damage from that storm is south of the fire, Hines said.

No one had been evacuated from the Boundary Waters as of Sunday evening, although forestry personnel were keeping tabs on people in the area. There also were no burning restrictions as of Sunday evening, but Hines said campers should keep fires small and contained and should thoroughly extinguish them.

The general area was the scene of a fire in 1976 and another in 1995 that both grew much larger than this blaze, Hines said.