'THE FIRE WE FEARED' Museum Fire near Flagstaff has been years in the making
From the minute the Museum Fire sparked just north of Flagstaff, officials knew it was the blaze they’ve been dreading for the better part of a decade.
A fire lookout spotted it about 11 a.m. on Sunday and within hours, 200 firefighters were assigned to it. More than a dozen aircraft attacked the flames as it exploded to 1,000 acres in the Dry Lake Hills recreation area Monday morning. It had grown to an estimated 1,400 acres by late Tuesday.
The fire is exactly where officials don’t want the forest to burn. It’s exactly the time of year that could spell di
saster for the world’s largest contiguous ponderosa pine forest and for nearby homes. And it’s in a position to wreak havoc on areas that were hit hardest after 2010’s disastrous Schultz Fire.
“It is bad timing and it’s in a bad location,” said Paul Summerfelt, Flagstaff wildland fire management officer. “It is the fire that we have feared.”
Homes hit by 2010 fire could be in danger
The last time Flagstaff burned like this, it was 2010.
The disastrous Schultz Fire consumed more than 15,000 acres and financially devastated many who lived on the outskirts of town — in neighborhoods with iconic names like Timberline and Fernwood — along U.S. Highway 89 to the northeast.
For Flagstaff, the issue wasn’t so much the fire that burned the pines and singed the mountaintops. It was the subsequent flooding that it kicked off.
The fire burned the trees, which act as a natural buffer against the watershed. Without them, water went rolling into the Timberline and Fernwood neighborhoods.
The water carried everything in its path — boulders, dead trees and sediment — and sent it crashing into homes.
The flooding killed 12-year-old Shaelyn Wilson, who fell into a wash and was swept away by the same water carrying that wreckage.
Even now, the aftermath of the Schultz Fire still causes problems.
Neighborhoods near the Schultz scar flooded again last July as water carried entire boulders and trees down the road.
The fire, floods and mitigation alone cost the region about $59 million, according to a report from Northern Arizona University.
The total financial impact was much more — about $147 million.
Now, officials are on edge as they see the Museum Fire heading in the same direction.
Museum Fire is blazing the same path
The Museum Fire is moving east, toward the neighborhoods the Schultz Fire hurt the most.
But officials hope to keep it contained in the Dry Lake Hills area.
Residents to the northeast of town are under a “Set” evacuation notice — meaning they need to be set to evacuate should the order come.
“(It is) a concern that that, as this fire moves further east, it will begin to impact those neighborhoods,” Summerfelt said. “Maybe not from the fire itself, but from potential flood impacts.”
A wildfire can remove trees that stand as a buffer against natural watersheds, causing problems for months or years after the last ember is extinguished.
This time of year, monsoon storms can be the catalyst the watershed needs to send a flash flood into one of these neighborhoods.
“Unfortunately, we just are not going to have a lot of time between when this fire gets wrapped up and when we might have our first significant monsoon,” Summerfelt said. “We’re a month and a half past when, in 2010, the Schultz Fire finished. That one was pretty much wrapped up toward the end of June and here we are, nearly the end of July.”
Smoke is preventing officials from getting a good look at what part of the Dry Lake Hills area is burning.
If the ground is mostly flat, floods might not be that bad, officials say.
Dick Fleishman, U.S. Forest Service operations coordinator for the Four Forest Restoration Initiative, was optimistic that the fire hadn’t gone too far up the hillside yet.
“If it’s burning on steep slopes ... we are definitely going to get some runoff out of it,” he said. “Until we actually see what’s been done ... I think it’s going to perform pretty well. But if it’s on a slope, we’ll see.”
Officials crafted $10M plan to prevent this
The city has spent years working on a plan to prevent something like this from happening.
It passed a $10 million bond in 2012 to thin the forest and protect the high country community.
They relied on predictions that a fire this close to town could:
❚ Pollute the city’s drinking water.
❚ Unleash the watershed and send a 500-year flood into downtown Flagstaff.
❚ Cause up to $1 billion in damages. Officials isolated several areas that needed the most protection. One of those areas was Dry Lake Hills.
The Museum Fire is burning almost exactly where officials had been working on thinning the forest.
The blaze could send floods down the Spruce Avenue Wash, which empties out behind the Safeway on West Street and Cedar Avenue, northeast of downtown. “The City of Flagstaff is in the bull’seye of this,” Fleishman said. “We are expecting rain the next couple days, so it could be tested a lot sooner than we would like to see.”
Part of the area was just thinned
A Phoenix-based logging company last May won a contract to thin several hundred acres in the Dry Lake Hills area.
Parts of where the Museum Fire is burning were just thinned, Summerfelt said. Other parts were not and are still full of the fuel a wildfire needs.
The treated areas could be the silver lining firefighting crews need. The fire may not be able to rise far into the air in those areas because most of its fuel is gone.
But the heavy smoke has prevented officials from being able to get a good look at it.
“In the portions that we’ve thinned, I’m fairly certain it’ll stay on the ground for the most part,” Fleishman said. “I’m sure there are spots that are burning hot there ... but it doesn’t look like Schultz when it comes to smoke.”
The area is within the watershed’s boundary, but Summerfelt is hopeful it won’t spread any soot or sediment southeast to Lake Mary, which provides about half of Flagstaff ’s drinking water.
“In terms of what its impact will be, that’s still to be determined,” he said. “We probably won’t know ... for probably another couple or three weeks, until we get a really good view of how hot it has burned.”