Thirty to 40 fires ignited when
high winds roll through region

BY CHRIS COWBROUGH
S-E Editor

    High winds slammed into Northeast Washington last Thursday afternoon, downing trees and starting fires that kept emergency crews on overload for several hours.
    The winds uprooted at least 13 trees in scenic Colville City Park and compromised at least that many more, according to Park Superintendent Todd Booth.  In residential neighbor¬hoods around the park and elsewhere in “Tree City USA,” trees were uprooted, narrowly missing homes in some cases and scoring direct hits on other homes and on parked vehicles.
    Particularly hard-hit was the Kettle River region from ap¬proximately Kamloops Island on the south to Barstow on the north.
    Spread by Thursday’s power¬ful winds, some gusting as high as 57 miles per hour, were a group of human-and wind-caused fires that destroyed at least two homes and threatened as many as 50 more up the Kettle River (see related stories).
    Referred to as the Doyle com¬plex, containment  was expected by Monday, ahead of a forecast for more substantial winds that were expected to blow in on Tuesday.
    Firefighters weren’t antici¬pating that the Barstow-area fires would grow much over the approximately 900 acres of brush, fields and timberland that had been scorched by Sat¬urday night in both Stevens and Ferry counties.

Series of fires

    Firefighters said that three of the more significant fires that ignited along the Kettle River in¬cluded the Flat Creek fire near Kamloops Campground and Twin Bridges, the Whispering Pines fire near Whispering Pines Campground and the Doyle Creek fire eight miles north in the Barstow community.
    The fires were battled pre¬dominantly by Department of Natural Resources, Forest Serv¬ice crews and local residents.
    Upwards of 300 firefighters battled fires around the area last week.  During the height of the fires, 28 families had to evacuate their homes.
    A Red Cross shelter was established at Kettle Falls High School on Thursday.
    On Thursday afternoon, State Highway 395 north of Kettle Falls was closed to all but essential personnel because of the fires raging upriver.  The Washington Department of Transportation reopened that portion of the highway on Friday morning.
    According to the Northeast Washington Interagency Com¬munication Center in Colville, the recently opened fire dispatch cooperative got its “initiation” last week with Thursday’s wind¬storm and fires.
    “The NEWICC folks hit the ground running,”  said Rette Bidstrup, NEWICC manager.  “With much to do in the way of integrating the terminology and procedures of fire response ef¬forts from DNR and the Forest Service into one streamlined outfit, the crew (at NEWICC) has managed to work across agency boundaries and team up for better efficiency, especially since the big windstorm.
    “In spite of the small handi¬caps we have, such as not hav¬ing a wall map, I think things are going well.”
    In and around Colville, the Colville Volunteer Fire Depart¬ment and fire district crews were busy battling wind-related and human-caused blazes Thursday afternoon and eve¬ning.
    The swath was wide and the calls for non-stop for emergency personnel.
    Thursday afternoon, as the winds started to kick up from what the National Weather Service described as an unusu¬ally strong summer cold front that swept into the region from British Columbia, the Colville Volunteer Fire Department got the first of several calls that would keep them busy into Thursday night.
    The first call mid-afternoon was to quell an eight to 10-acre blaze that started along a hill¬side off Mumau Road and High¬way 20 east of Colville, accord¬ing to Colville Volunteer Fire Department Chief, Jeff Pitts.
    District 7, DNR, Forest Serv¬ice, Little Pend Oreille Wildlife Range and Colville Volunteer Fire Department crews, along with numerous neighbors whose homes were threatened for a time, battled that fire in brisk winds that would get stronger as the afternoon went on.

Structure fire turns into pump house fire

    Colville crews were on scene of that apparently human-caused fire for about 1 ½ hours before responding to another call of a fire start just east of Dominion Meadows Golf Course.  That fire burned approximately one acre before it was extin¬guished.
    Pitts said fire district crews got a call about the same time to a reported structure fire on Knapp Road.  The structure fire turned into a blaze in a tree and pump house. No home was in¬volved, Pitts said.
    Among other calls fielded for assistance was a blaze off Gold Creek Loop (tree across a power line).  That blaze consumed about seven acres.
    “We probably got about 10 calls in there about trees across power lines,”  Pitts said, adding that the scenario was reminis¬cent of Firestorm back in 1991, “although it was not as hot a day.”
    Pitts said that the 911 com¬munications center was so swamped with calls for emer¬gency assistance that district and city fire crews resorted to an old standby—cell phones.  
    “The 911 center was so swamped that we couldn’t communicate,”  Pitts said.  “Thank God for cell phones.”
    Colville Mayor Dick Nichols said that emergency responders and city personnel were stretched to the limit, but did everything they could do to help a community through the latest “Mother Nature” had to offer.
    “It’s easy for people to shoot at state, city and federal em¬ployees,”  Nichols said on Friday in the aftermath of Windstorm 2008.  “But our city crews, po¬lice, fire, water-sewer…all our departments…they all showed up and asked what they could do.
    “And our Colville residents—many of them got into it and helped out.  Our residents were a really big help cleaning up and helping clear downed trees.”

Swim meet goes on as scheduled

    The city park took a hard hit.  There was damage to the back¬stop and bleachers at the Little League field.  The Kegel Shelter was destroyed when trees came down on top of it.  Law enforce¬ment cordoned off the entirely of the park to keep the public out and allow crews to start the clean-up process.
    Despite the damage, debris and downed timber, the annual Colville Valley Swim Club Invi¬tational Swim Meet went on as scheduled.  There were some concessions made by swimmers and their families, however.  Normally, the entire east side of the park is lined with campers and the entire park is reminis¬cent of a campground.  Only a portion of the east side was available to Canadian visitors last weekend after the blow-down.
    Canadian visitors  camped in the Colville Municipal Pool parking lot and elsewhere around the park.  But the hard¬est hit portion of the park around the Rotary Pavilion and south to Hawthorne Street, was mostly cordoned off last week¬end.
    “That area was particularly hard hit,”  Booth said on a tour of a facility he holds near and dear last Friday morning.  
    “We are going to make this work,”  Booth said a few hours before a major influx of Cana¬dian swimmers and their fami¬lies arrived.
    The Summer Jam concert on Friday night and Sunday night’s Doctor’s Concert, both at the pavilion, went off as planned.
    Swimmers from both the lo¬cal club and from British Co¬lumbia pitched in with clean-up during the weekend.
    “I wish I had more rakes,”  Booth said.  “That’s a big help.”
    Booth said the blow-down would trigger a major assess¬ment of the health and safety of “every tree in the park…we’ll do a complete assessment…look at the base of each tree to see where the roots have heaved.”    
    Booth, and a lot of other peo¬ple, felt fortunate that the storm didn’t happen 24-hours later when the park would have been filled with Canadian visitors.
    “That could have been devas¬tating,”  he said.
    Contrary to rumors, there were no serious injuries sus¬tained in Colville’s City Park during the storm.  
    Booth, head of the city’s Park Department for 18 years, looked at the destruction around him and said the scene was an up¬setting one.

‘It could have been a lot worse.’

    “Thankfully, nobody got hurt…it could have been a lot worse,”  he said.  “But I love these trees…it’s hard to look at.”
    Elsewhere around town, scores of trees came down in the late afternoon’s wild weather, which, according to National Weather Service Warning Coor¬dination Meteorologist Kerry Jones, was triggered by severe contrasts in the temperature and in air pressure.
    On Thursday afternoon, tem¬peratures went from the mid to high 80s to the low 60s by eve¬ning.
    Jones, who visited the Colville valley on Friday to take a look, said those types of con¬trasts tend to generate strong winds.  
    Those winds damaged homes and vehicles, started fires and generally wreaked havoc all around the valley and beyond.
    The Chewelah Golf & Coun¬try Club was particularly hard hit on the eve of its annual Chataqua Best-Ball Golf Tour¬nament.  At least 100 trees on the course came down as high winds whipped through the Sand Canyon area above Chew¬elah.
    Dominion Meadows Golf Course lost three big trees to the storm.