CLICK THE THUMBNAILS TO HEAR JACK HALL’S INTERVIEW WITH KEITH MURPHY, DNR
Fire crews are still mopping up after an escaped campfire caused an approximately 136-acre wildfire Sunday near Manton in downstateWexford County.
The Fife Lake Outlet Fire began after a campfire at a private residence escaped its ring and burned through dry grass, said Bret Baker, fire supervisor in the Michigan Department of Natural Resources’ Cadillac office.
It was fueled by dry grass and dry leaves and needles on the ground, Baker said. The fire burned through jack pine, red pine and oak trees.
“It hasn’t been this dry before this early in the season,” Baker said.
Here in the Upper Peninsula, the wildfire danger is also severe, says Keith Murphy, fire specialist with the DNR office in Marquette.
“The msjority of the U.P. has extreme fire danger,” Murphy told RRN News Tuesday afternoon. “The beautiful conditions out there have been drying our fields out. Lack of rain. We haven’t had rain in quite a while. The past few days, I’d say the for the past week-and-a-half, we’ve all responded to fires all across the entire Upper Peninsula. But nothing has gotten big, thank God. But with the fuel conditions that we have, we’re going to have trouble stopping fires.”
Murphy says he’s especially concerned about fires breaking out in the northern U.P. forests where most of the trees are pine trees.
“If you get a start in that pine country, it wouldn’t be hard to get it up into the (tree) crowns,” Murphy said. “You’d have a very intense, fast-moving fire.”
Murphy adds that even in places where the fields have greened up, there’s still worries, like in a fire over the holiday weekend in Delta County’s Ford River Township.
“It burned clean through the green grass,” he said. “Now, granted, it didn’t get very big. But it consumer all of the green grass, even.”
Murphy says that no burn permits are being issued anywhere in the Upper Peninsula, and it will stay that way “until we get some rain, and that’s going to be a while”.
In that big northern Lower Michigan fire, Michigan State Police assisted the DNR by evacuating a nearby campground. A total of 18 DNR firefighters and crews from five local fire departments battled the blaze. It was contained at about 10 p.m. Sunday. Evacuees were allowed to return to the campground around 11 p.m.
DNR firefighters were assisted by the City of Manton Fire Department and the Fife Lake Area, Cedar Creek, South Boardman and Haring Township fire departments. Equipment used included four bulldozers, one skidder and four engines. The USDA Forest Service provided two Fire Boss tanker airplanes, which strategically dropped water on the fire in a coordinated effort with the DNR’s spotter airplane.
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