A dozen officials from Park City and Summit County gathered Thursday evening to discuss the Parleys Canyon Fire, providing a sobering perspective on the scale of the fuel mitigation work that officials say is key in the fight against a future catastrophic fire, and sharing some previously undiscussed details about how the fire progressed.
Jessica Kirby, Summit County’s public lands manager, indicated the amount of work needed to treat overgrown forests around the county is daunting.
“To be brutally honest, this is an enormous problem. … 80% of our county is adjacent to or in a forested area,” Kirby said.
The mitigation work removes some trees, lower limbs and shrubs referred to as “ladder fuels” that can accelerate a fire’s growth.
Officials are working to finance more of those projects in the wake of the Parleys Canyon Fire, which forced the evacuation of 8,000 residents in the Summit Park, Timberline and Pinebrook neighborhoods last month. No structures were lost in the fire, which did not crest a ridgeline separating it from the neighborhoods thanks to favorable weather and an overwhelming response from firefighting aircraft.
The fire was heading directly into a forested area that Kirby’s team had recently treated in Summit Park, timing she referred to as serendipitous. But that work, which covered 300 acres, took two years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Park City Emergency Manager Mike McComb said city officials had recently discussed the total cost of fuel mitigation work in land surrounding Park City and estimated it would cost $28 million.
That’s nearly half Park City’s operational budget.
Kirby estimated the annual local capacity for fuel treatment work is about 2,500 acres, with the number of acres that need work many times that. She cited as limiting factors cost, labor availability and the amount of biomass — dead trees and other plant matter — created in the thinning process.
She said the effort would require a significant restructuring of the industry, identifying needs for skilled sawyers, businesses to consume the wood and creative solutions like goat herders directing their animals to priority areas.
“We can’t cut our way out of this,” Kirby said. “The fire is going to come, another one’s going to come. … Mitigation doesn’t stop fire. It just slows it down.”
Details come to light
Early on the afternoon of Aug. 14, four brush fires sparked along Interstate 80 and quickly joined together, with one branch heading uphill toward hundreds of homes in Summit Park. Officials credited good preparation and a strong dose of luck for averting disaster.
“Luck is the residue of preparation,” McComb said. “I think that was exceptionally true here.”
A monsoon rainstorm and ensuing cold front hit the fire days after it started, effectively ending the threat. Summit County Fire Warden Bryce Boyer said that wasn’t the only thing that went right.
“Things just fell into place. With (the) aircraft request, Oregon was not able to fly because of the amount of smoke that they had. That left those aircraft available that we were able to get them,” he said. “The Type 2 team was already, I believe, grouping up, or had been, because they were going to go to another fire. They didn’t need them on that, so they got moved over to this incident, so it rapidly escalated and de-escalated as far as the management side of it. Don’t expect it to do that all the time.”
Other interesting pieces of information that emerged from the discussion included the fact that Salt Lake County will be responsible for the cost of the response, as the fire happened on that county’s land. Federal funds will cover 75% of that bill, officials said.
And Summit County Sheriff Justin Martinez said that Sheriff’s deputies were prepared to physically remove children from homes that were under evacuation orders if their parents chose to stay.
“I cannot forcibly remove somebody from their house if they’re an adult. However, if they have kids that are juvenile age, 18 or under, I then can go ahead and forcibly remove that child or children because that would be considered child neglect, child abuse,” Martinez said. “So in those circumstances, we were prepared to take that action. Thank goodness that was never placed at our feet and we just had a few residents that chose to stay against all pleas from the Sheriff’s Office.”
Martinez said that only about 10 people chose to remain in their homes.
Responding to a question about what would happen in a worst-case scenario fire, Boyer said that the risk would likely be too great to deploy firefighters on the ground.
“It’s going to be an aircraft show. One of the big things with evacuations is (if) those aircrafts start coming in and see people running around or out in the neighborhood, they’re not going to drop, they’re going to divert. When we ask for evacuations, there are a number of reasons behind it. One is the safety (of residents). The other is, it can limit what resources we can use as firefighters.”
Preparing for the next one
Officials recommended residents have a written evacuation plan including what they’ll need if they’re outside their homes for 72 hours. Kirby, who lost a home in a previous wildfire, recommended having plans for what to take if the evacuation order leaves five minutes to pack, or 10 minutes or an hour.
Deputy County Manager Janna Young, who also lost a home in a previous blaze, recommended practicing evacuation plans with family members, increasing home insurance policies every few years and photographing every room and cupboard in a house to be prepared for a potential insurance claim.
“(Insurance adjusters) want to know every single item that you lost in your home and its value. And in our situation, we had families whose homes were leveled, there was not even a chimney left. And so they’re having to do that inventory all by memory, which is really hard to do,” she said.