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Mount Graham fires intensify

SAFFORD - Huge columns of black smoke darkened the Gila Valley Tuesday as fire roared through the dried and dying forest atop the Pinaleno Mountains, nearly doubling in size and burning through a complex of communications towers and equipment atop 10,022-foot Heliograph Peak. The day's good news, for the 1,000-member force fighting the Nuttall Complex Fire, was that fire never breached the line being scratched along the ridge beneath Southern Arizona's highest peaks, nor did it reach the summer cabins in Turkey Flat and Columbine, or make it to the $250 million complex of observatories on Emerald Peak. "In general, we had a lot of fire on the mountain today but we held our own," said incident commander Dan Oltrogge. He estimated the fire's size at 25,000 to 30,000 acres, nearly double the 15,767 acres mapped Monday night. Most of the growth came on the Gibson Fire side. The two lightning-caused fires are being fought as one. Oltrogge said the communications towers and buildings on Heliograph Peak, valued at $2 million by the Forest Service, seem to have survived the fire. He attributed that to the work his crews did removing vegetation and wrapping some buildings in flame-resistant material. One small outbuilding had flames when firefighters flew over the area. They will check it out on the ground today. Bill Perry, news director and production manager of KATO-AM in Safford, said the station never lost its signal from the peak, though it cut its power in half when the engineer at the station recorded 150-degree temperatures from a remote sensor at its transmitter facility. Graham County Sheriff Frank Hughes said his radio dispatches, partly reliant on the peak, were also uninterrupted. Today, though, will be another test of firefighters' ability to hold the line. Oltrogge said fire became seated in Fry Canyon, just below Emerald Peak, and burned to within half a mile of the ridge where the observatories sit. But last evening, that fire was cooling off as the upslope currents of the afternoon shifted. If it reaches the ridge today, it will not have the ferocity of Tuesday's run, Oltrogge said, and crews should be able to stop it. "I don't think it poses a major threat," he said. He was not as optimistic about Turkey Flat, where about 85 summer cabins sit on Forest Service land. Asked to estimate the potential for fire to burn through, he put it at 60 percent. The observatories may be more pricey but the summer cabins are precious, say their owners. Gene Robert Larson said his family bought his family's cabin just for him. "I was a sickling," he said, and needed a place to be cool in the summers. His entire family would move to Turkey Flat for the summer, taking a cow and chickens. When he was allowed up the mountain Saturday to rescue some of his possessions, he retrieved the chest built by his great-grandfather and a wringer washer that runs on propane. The mountain air worked on his chronic bronchial pneumonia, Larson said. He has survived to 74 and hopes to see 90. He now shares his summer place with six children, 23 grandchildren and "eight, no nine" great-grandchildren – not to mention his three brothers' families. It was the thought of those cabin owners that prodded Alex Stone's contract crew of fire retardant suppliers back to mixing up slurry after an agonizing three-hour wait for a replacement forklift Tuesday. Because the crews could not move the 1-ton containers of dry retardant to the tanker truck for mixing, the seven helicopters dipping into the tanks at the heliport carried only water to the fire during the wait. When the replacement arrived, Stone persuaded the contractor to stop work on setting up a bigger reservoir for today's attack and go back to mixing retardant. Pointing to the boiling black cloud rising over a nearby ridge, Stone said: "I didn't want anybody saying we didn't do all we could to slow this fire down." Crews charged with battling a major blaze on a "sky island" mountain like the Pinalenos are immediately dealt a tough hand for two of the three pillars of fire behavior - fuels and topography. Weather, the third key, is always the wild card, with hour-by-hour changes in wind, temperature and humidity largely dictating fire activity in the short term. With fuels, decades of fire suppression have left nearly all of the forests in Southern Arizona choked with small trees and ground litter. Drought has further stressed the vegetation, and a cascade of insect outbreaks has killed trees up and down the mountain. With topography, the Pinalenos offer some of the roughest country in the Southwest, jutting up 7,000 feet from the desert floor, sometimes almost vertically in chutes and canyons that act like chimneys. "There's probably not a more difficult mountain in Arizona to fight fire on than the Pinalenos," operations section chief Pruett Small said. Over and over, fire managers have stressed it will be weather that puts out the Nuttall Complex, not the firefighters. Moisture that could put a damper on the Nuttall Complex is now trapped in central Sonora. But it's expected to spread across the border this week as high pressure to the southeast of the fire moves north, allowing its clockwise rotation to steer moisture up into Arizona, said National Weather Service meteorologist Tom Evans. There's a 10 percent chance of thunderstorms over the Pinalenos today and Thursday. The probability increases to 30 percent Friday and Saturday, then falls to 20 percent Sunday through Tuesday, Evans said. Even if it doesn't rain, the humidity is expected to increase and temper fire behavior, especially overnight. As is the norm, winds at the fire generally have traveled up-slope during the day while the desert floor bakes, then reversed to go downhill at night as cold air sinks. That can give an extra push to wildfires, which already prefer to travel uphill as they preheat fuel above - something easy to see by striking a match and tilting it. Today and Thursday, afternoon winds are expected to come out of the west at 10 to 20 mph. That would tend to push the Gibson Fire away from the telescopes, but toward the Turkey Flat area, and perhaps nudge the Nuttall Complex toward the observatories, cabins at Columbine and Gibson Fire. The four large and three medium helicopters fighting the fire were joined briefly Tuesday by two tanker planes that had been detoured to new fires in the Gila National Forest east of here on Monday. The planes made three drops before returning to their Phoenix base. Today, said Oltrogge, the mission remains the same - to cut a horseshoe-shaped line around the two fires, burn it back toward the advancing flames and let it creep downhill into lighter fuels where, if it doesn't burn itself out or get extinguished by rains, it will be easier to control with bulldozer lines. Safford, Thatcher and Pima, the towns that sit at the foot of the mountains, are in no danger, he said. But Sheriff Hughes said he is getting an increasing number of calls from residents in the Graham foothills who are watching the fire's slow advance downslope. He said he understands. "Seeing this mountain burn like this," he said as the afternoon sun reddened behind the smoke, "it's just scary." The cost of fighting the fire is estimated at $1 million a day. There is a lot to protect, said Jim Palmer, chairman of the Graham County Board of Supervisors. The tiny county has already benefited from the construction of the Mount Graham International Observatory atop the mountain and is looking for a big boost in interest when the complex's centerpiece, the Large Binocular Telescope, begins operation, perhaps this fall. Oltrogge said the telescope buildings, even if the fire reaches them, stand a good chance of surviving. They are well-built and have been prepared for the fire by clearing, thinning and wetting the area around them. Officials were optimistic Tuesday, meanwhile, that the communities of Payson, Pine and Strawberry will be safe from the 85,000-acre Willow Fire burning in central Arizona, now 17 percent contained.