As of Monday evening the costs of the Funny River fire tallied out at $8,894,983.
Michelle Weston of the Alaska Interagency Incident Management Team talked about the costs and crews ramping down.
Weston: “As we demobilize, we have large busses of hot shot crews and the type 2 crews leaving the area and so what you’re going to see is a ramping down of the costs. With all fires in Alaska, a lot of the significant portion of the costs is the air support or the air resources so when you see a fire like this which has a lot of remote fire behavior aspects or areas where you can best suppress the fire by using aerial assets, you see a large portion of the budget eaten up in aerial fire suppression costs.”
She added that the second highest cost is for that of the skilled fire crews. As we reported last week Finance Section Chief Jaci Stimach with the team said that the state tracks expenses however, most of this fires finances will likely come from federal funds as a majority of the fire was on federal lands.
Weston also clarified…
Weston: “Just because we’ve ramped down crews does not mean that the fire is out, we expect the fire will be burning all summer in the Refuge area, limited amount of helicopter support will still be here and the number of crews to continue working on mop up and do point protection, in areas which means remote cabins within the refuge as needed.”
As for their team, Weston said they are still monitoring the weather.
Weston: “Both the refuge and the local division of forestry office have asked us to stick around at least until Friday to determine if any drying trends in weather kicks up any additional areas of concern, if it doesn’t then we will probably transition over the weekend and the fire will then be managed by a type 3 team.”