The city of Anderson has been under evacuation orders since Saturday, as firefighting agencies scrambled over the weekend to respond to wildfires ignited by three days of lightning around Interior Alaska.
The Starry Fire was first reported around 6 p.m. Saturday about a mile-and-a-half north of the Clear Space Force Station. Sam Harrel, a spokesperson for the Alaska Division of Forestry and Fire Protection, said the fire was very close to Anderson on Saturday night.
“Fortunately, the winds pushed the fire to the south away from the community,” he said. “It could have been a much different story Saturday evening.”
The fire had been estimated at 700 acres, but a Sunday update from the forestry division said new calculations show it’s about 550 acres. The Tri-Valley School in Healy is serving as a shelter for evacuees, according to the Denali Borough.
Borough officials said Sunday evening that about 75 people were assigned to the fire, along with dozers and aircraft. The forestry division said the crews had made “good progress on the fire.”
Anderson has a population under 200 people and is about 80 miles southwest of Fairbanks on the Parks Highway. Borough officials said travel along the Parks had not been impacted by the fire.
Meanwhile, state and local fires have been fighting a lightning-caused wildfire in an agricultural area about 17 miles east of Delta Junction. The Granite Fire, which was reported on Saturday morning in a forested area near some cleared fields, had burned about 36 acres as of Sunday evening.
Harrel said agency officials called in firefighting crews from White Mountain and a Tanana Chiefs Conference crew from Fairbanks to fight the fire.
“They did a really good job getting around that fire Saturday evening with a lot of water-scooping aircraft and the retardant tankers,” he said.
Harrel said crews quickly bulldozed a fireline and used that, along with some swampy areas, to encircle about 80% of the fire by Saturday evening.
He said the tanker made several fire retardant drops before returning to its base in Fairbanks.
“We had so many new fires in the Interior on Saturday afternoon and evening that we really needed to move those aerial assets around to where they were needed.,” he said. “We needed to reassign a lot of them to Anderson a few hours later when that fire took off.”
Forestry also got help from local firefighters and equipment from Deltana Volunteer Fire Department and City of Delta Fire Department. Harrel said the agency contracted some area farmers, who brought their tractors and farm implements to work over the land in some areas to slow the fire from spreading.
“They also have tractors with disks that they can pull through and turn the ground over to remove those flashy, fine fuels on the ground to really slow the fire spread,” he said.
The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning over the weekend due to critical fire conditions, including dry fuels and a chance of lightning in some areas Monday. The warning remains in effect until 10 p.m. Monday, but the forecast for the Interior calls for showers and cooler temperatures through Wednesday.