Fire crews battle rangeland fires

The sirens of fire trucks are being heard often in the Mountain Home area these days as local and state fire crews have begun battling a rash of wildfires that have broken out.

Monday night and Tuesday the Mountain Home volunteer fire department battled several small grass fires near Mountain Home, but last week fire crews from the BLM were engaged in several major fires in the area, even as Wildfire Prevention Week was being celebrated.

Fire crews were urging all area residents to be cautious and issued a series of warnings about the use of fireworks, which are banned on public lands. In addition, Idaho Power has announced that due to the fire risk the use of fireworks are being forbidden at all of the campgrounds it operates, including those at the 3,000-acre C.J. Strike Wildlife Managment area and its campgrounds on the reservoir.

Because of the wet spring, cheatgrass, which is highly flammable, is in great abundance on the desert right now, and the BLM already has had to respond to 18 human-caused wildfires this fire season.

The BLM fought two major wildfires in the area this weekend.

The largest, the Martha's Mud Fire, located about eight miles northwest of Mountain Home near Tipanuk, had burned nearly 4,500 acres. It was declared contained about noon Monday and crews brought it fully under control later that evening, leaving just some mop-up and monitoring work that was still going on Tuesday.

The fire was caused by a bird hitting a power line Sunday afternoon.

Large amounts of dry grass and sage, combined with strong afternoon winds, caused the fire to spread rapidly. All told, the BLM had six heavy engines, three helicopters, to single-engine air tankers and one air attack team involved, as well as two U.S. Forest Service heavy engines, two bulldozers, two water tankers and two fire engines from the Oasis Volunteer fire department involved in fighting the blaze.

Earlier that afternoon, the BLM also responded to the Wandering View fire about four miles northeast of Grand View. That fire burned about 300 acres and was controlled late Sunday night.

The fire was described as human-caused and an investigation is under way.

Resources used for that fire included two BLM heavy engines, one bulldozer, a water tender, a helicopter, an air attack team and two Grand View Volunteer Fire Department engines.

The Mountain Home Volunteer Fire Department was asked to assist with both fires, but Fire Chief Phil Gridley reluctantly refused the request for mutual aid. "We had a number of firemen out of town that weekend and we had to make sure we had enough firefighters to cover our own people," in Mountain Home and the Mountain Home Rural Fire District. "I felt terrible about it, but if I'd sent them off and we'd had a fire here, we'd have been short of manpower."

His crews, however, were kept busy over the weekend, anyway.

On Saturday, a homeowner in the 100 block of Goodall Street, behind North Elementary, while digging in his yard with a shovel, accidentally ruptured a gas main. Fire crews stood by until repairs could be made and a number of homes in the area were evacuated for a little over an hour.

Crews also responded Saturday on Airbase Road to a fire on board a truck carrying hay. Gridley said the fire apparently started when some electrical wires leading from the cab to the trailer shorted out.