Wildfires burned across the western United States this summer. Firefighters from South Dakota are among those who were called in to assist. A local Incident Commander and his team were assigned to the Carpenter Road fire in Washington.
Jay Esperance is the Director of Wild Land Fires in South Dakota. He says this year there were too many fires and too few firefighters.
“Got to tell you, this summer, especially in August, there just wasn’t enough for as many fires going on especially in the Pacific Northwest. So this summer I was very concerned,” says Esperance.
Esperance is part of the Rocky Mountain Incident Management Blue Team. They spent 22 days on the Carpenter Road Fire.
“It was explosive fire conditions, probably not seen in the United States like that since 1910. For our incident management team, this has been the largest fire that we’ve ever been on. It ended up being 65 thousand acres which is about 101 square miles,” Esperance says.
Esperance says that the lack of resources and dry windy hot weather made this fire especially difficult.
“I had maybe a quarter of what I needed to get the job done successfully. So we were stretched out as far as we can,” says Esperance. “It was not a good situation, just was not a good situation. I sure could have used a lot more resources, but they just weren’t available,” Esperance added.
He says the weather played a big part in fighting the fire.
“It seemed like we would gain ground on part of a fire but be losing the same amount of ground on another part of the fire. So our containment never seemed to grow. Quite frankly, when the weather came in, that’s what helped us catch the fire and be able to contain it. Mother Nature’s the one that started it. She also helped us, with the rain that we got, to suppress the fire,” says Esperance.
Officials believe the Carpenter Road Fire is human caused. They say the fire is now 100 percent contained.