Leading into the new year, KSRM will be recapping our top ten stories of 2014: exploring the issues that had the deepest impact on our community.
The wind-driven fire which was first reported as about a 2 acre fire near the Soldotna Airport on May 19 grew to be known as the Funny River Fire which consumed nearly 200,000 acres by the time it was finished.
In just a matter of hours the fire had grown to 960 acres and at the time was competing for resources with the Tyonek fire which the Nikiski Fire Department had responded to across the the Cook Inlet.
As an incident command center was brought in and set up at the former Skyview High School, community meetings were held at the Tustumena Elementary School, Kenai River Center on Funny River Road, and in Sterling.
Incident Commander Rob Allen with the inter agency response teams spoke at many of the meetings where residents were quite worried.
Resident: “Six years I’ve never known them to ever be able to put out a fire. They start test fires and they get away from them, who’s responsible and can you put out the fire? It’s that simple why wait!?”
Allen: “And we’re back to where we started before, we are working on putting out the fire, as soon as I get resources and I get the ability to put people on the ground I’ll put them on the fire, I don’t have access to every crew, every engine, every peice of apparatus that I’d like to have in my pocket right now. I have to wait for it to get here. This was not in monitor status, they went after this fire, they thought they had it, they were getting close and then he said then the wind picked up and he watched it walk away from him and he said it was the most hopeless feeling he’d had in a long time.”
The severity of the Funny River Fire became apparent when portions of the Pollard Loop Area were put on alert to be prepared to evacuate at a moment’s notice, which eventually came on May 23.
Brad Nelson with Central Emergency Services…
Nelson: “We got informed by several residents, we were getting a flood of calls at the incident command post about flames getting really really close to the houses. So Chief Mokracek and I took a ride out here to the Heavy Down area and what we saw was an extremely high, fast wall of flame coming right towards that subdivision, it was one of those kind of ok time to make a decision now type of thing. We knew it was getting into the swamp area, we knew it was getting into night time but it was just getting that close, one of those better safe than sorry type thing. Chief Mokracek went ahead and made the decision, it’s time to go ahead and bring all of our resources in and start having the people come on out.”
Only one of the evacuations during the fire was for an extended period of time, after which a community member named time remarked on how well all the evacuations went.
Tim: “There was no confusion, there was nothing. These men knew exactly what they were doing and they executed it.”
During the eight days the Funny River Fire blazed out of control and tore through over 196,808 acres of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, not one house was lost and no injuries were reported.
By June 4, the fire had been contained to 60%, and was considered under control and portions of the Interagency Incident Command teams began dispatching their crews to different fires around the U.S. even though monitoring of the fire continued into July.
For KSRM’s extensive coverage of the Funny River Fire, click here.
