STANLEY, Idaho — Mike De Fries of the Rocky Mountain Incident Management Team 1 escorted Idaho News 6 past the road closure on Highway 21 west of Stanley to get a look at the challenges firefighters have been dealing with on the Wapiti Fire.
This incident team took over on Saturday and it has been some hard days for the firefighters and people of Stanley as the Wapiti Fire has threatened homes and forced evacuations.
"This fire is very aggressive we have got to prioritize those things that people value most," said De Fries. "First and foremost it is public and firefighter safety, but then it also people’s homes, their property, key infrastructure and key locations that are very important to the community."
Our first stop was on Iron Creek Road where Mike showed us where crews backburned the area to save homes in the subdivision. They ignited an area on the north side of the road down to Highway 21 and continued up to the neighboring subdivision.
"The idea is to try and have more defensible space knowing that we got wind shifts and really aggressive fire behavior," said De Fries.
That aggressive fire behavior also sent embers over the ridge north of Highway 21 where a spot fire started and then started circling around forcing the evacuation of Lower Stanley.
Helicopters were sent in and hot shot crews worked through the night on Tuesday creating a path for a dozer to get up on the ridge to make a line to protect homes near Lower Stanley.
"The goal is to stop that spot fire and fully suppress that," said De Fries who tells us the area is not out of the woods yet because of a drop in relative humidity and a change in the wind direction. "We’ve known about it and it’s been forecasted, but the winds are coming out of the west and northwest, which changes the angle on which the fire wants to go."
The Wapiti Fire has become the highest priority fire in the country and another challenge comes with all the different fronts firefighters are working on from Lowman up to Stanley.
The fire has burned more than 90,000 acres, it's zero percent contained and the incident team has nearly 1,000 personnel working on the fire. However, the Sawtooth Valley Rural Fire Department has also been on the job as they went into protection mode.
"This fire has given us something that we have never seen come through this area before," said Burton Stanley.
Burton works as an excavator when he's not volunteering with the department, but he also has a home in Homestead Area where the primary engagement happened after the fire roared past Stanley Lake.
"We have lost zero structures so far and I say that for the Homestead and that community," said Stanley. "The fire came this way and we did lose one structure out farther west of town."
Residents in Stanley remain on edge and for the latest evacuation levels and closures you can click here.
