ELY— When lightning ignited the Pagami Creek wildfire fire in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness on Aug. 18, 2011, Superior National Forest personnel made the decision to keep it within a reasonable maximum management area while allowing natural processes to do their thing, rather than try to suppress it.
The fire smoldered in a bog for several days. After 12 days of the fire burning east of here off the end of the Fernberg Trail, it had grown to about 130 acres, and fire management officials thought things were going well.
But on Sept. 12, strong, gusting winds spread the fire 16 miles to the east, and 93,000 acres later, the fifth-largest fire in Minnesota history, and the largest in nearly a century, was running rampant. The fire was finally extinguished some 70 days later at a cost of nearly $6 million
Two Ely-area fire professionals spoke to a packed Tuesday Group gathering last week to give an overview of the events of the Pagami Creek Fire. The discussion was part of a series of events marking the tenth anniversary of the fire emergency near Ely. Another Tuesday Group session on the beneficial effects of fire, including post-Pagami Creek Fire insights, is scheduled for Tuesday, April 12.
Tom Roach was a fire fighter working on the Lake One portage during the fire, and was actively engaged on the fire line. He is currently the Superior National Forest Assistant Fire Management Officer based out of Cook.
Carl Skustad, Superior National Forest Kawishiwi District Recreation and Wilderness Lead, was an acting District Ranger and Lead Resource Advisor during the Pagami Creek Fire.
Ely was at least eight to ten miles from the Pagami Creek Fire and few people even smelled smoke. However, for areas to the south, like Duluth and on to Milwaukee, Wis., and even Chicago, the scene was quite different.
“The fire started in a lowland, black spruce piece of ground near Pagami Creek off Lake One,” Roach said. “It was pretty inaccessible at that point, and we watched it burn from the air for the first week or ten days. The wind picked up and it took off like fires typically do up here, and burned into a big cigar-shaped fire spreading into no man’s land.”
By Aug. 27, it had grown to about 300 acres. “The fuels were dry and everything was available for consumption at this point. We weren’t in what would be considered a drought, but in mid-August things were pretty dry,” he said.
Some torching of trees was beginning, and air attack crews were immediately called in.
Skustad was on the helicopter attack crew based at Ely and served as a resource advisor. “We wore many hats and I was also a helicopter manager and was managing helicopter crew safety,” he said.
Roach added, “The reason we have helicopter landing spots in there is we have to have a way to extract our personnel in an emergency. It is also an efficient way to get gear in and out of the area. There were very few safety zones, few water sources and a lack of natural boundaries around the fire at this point.”
For Labor Day weekend, many canoe campers had plans to go into Lake One, Lake Two and beyond.
“We were trying to manage that situation without having to close down a huge chunk of wilderness,” Roach said.
Resources were called in from around the country, as far away as Missouri and Montana, to help monitor and respond to the fire, according to Roach.
“Our primary objective at this point was to keep the fire from getting out of the wilderness and burn north toward the Fernberg (Trail) corridor and the resorts up north. We were looking to nurse this thing around the bottom of Lake Two and to burn in the wilderness. The perimeter did hold, except for the perimeter that didn’t hold.”
On Sept. 12, shifting winds caused the fire to begin a sequence of crown fire runs. Four public safety crews were in the Insula Lake area moving canoe campers out of an area fire managers thought might be threatened. A rapid run east by the fire overtook six wilderness rangers, who followed protocol and deployed fire shelters. None of them were injured.
“There were campers out there,” Skustad said. “We were out in front of this with our public safety crews and moving people out of the way. We closed a few lakes at a time, and usually that is enough. We learned from this fire that many times that is not enough.”
He referenced the Greenwood Lake Fire of last year.
“When you saw last summer that we chose to close larger areas of the wilderness, that is a direct result of what we learned on the Pagami. We learned that it takes a long time to get people out of the wilderness. Last summer, some five days after closing a portion, I still found people in there who had no clue the area was closed.”
Another wind shift caused the fire to expand further east. This was followed by another wind shift to the northwest, causing the fire to spread more than ten miles southeast and outside of the southern wilderness boundary, threatening an area northeast of the town of Isabella.
By Sept. 13, the fire was approximately 93,000 acres in size. After fire crews prevented any further significant expansion of the fire, and despite difficult access and terrain, containment lines were constructed around most of the fire.
Campfire restrictions were lifted across the area by Oct. 14. By mid-November the area within the fire perimeter remained 93,000 acres and more than 90 percent of the fire was surrounded with a continuous fire break.
A significant change in weather contributed to the fire burning out. “Rain and an accumulating amount of hail on the evening of Sept. 12 was what did it,” Roach said.
The humidity went up and the rain came down. The Pagami Creek Fire was a national-priority fire, he added. “By this time we had many aircraft from across the country that had been prioritized.”