They didn’t expect just how significantly the weather would change today.
“You think you’re within prescription, you think everything’s going fine, and it can really take just one second for a fire like this to get away,” says Wildfire Mitigation Specialist Annaleasa Winter.
Conditions this morning appeared to favor a prescribed burn in the Pumpkin Hill State Park on the far Northside, so the park was granted permission to do a 95 acre burn. This afternoon, however, the wind picked up and the humidity quickly dropped, and the fire jumped containment lines and grew to 400 acres.
For the dozens of people stranded on Cedar Point while the road was closed because of the fire, it was a miscalculation they couldn’t understand.
“I don’t know why they let a controlled burn with the wind we had today,” says Kenny Adams, who has lived in the area his whole life.
Adams was trying to get to his home where his mother was inside, and she wasn’t allowed out although they were communicating. His home specifically wasn’t threatened.
He’s not the only onlooker that was caught without threat, but with many questions.
Teresa Hutchins and Brenda Hester were standing in the parking lot of the Oak Grove Baptist Church handing out drinks to the dozens caught in the road closure. Hester tells me she was scared of what she saw.
“I just stood there and it kept on getting blacker and blacker,” she says.
Winter says the conditions did, in fact, change quickly, but the decision to burn today was the right call when they made it, specifically because of the high risk of wildfire from the large amount of fuel in the park.
“The best protection for these residences out here is to try to mitigate these fuels before this wildfire season gets any deeper,” she says.
Fire Chief Martin Senterfitt says the weather is more cooperative now, but that could still mean problems on your morning commute.
“It could kind of whiteout situations- we don’t want anyone getting in accidents out here so caution is the word,” he says.
He wasn’t surprised to see the fire spread so quickly after it jumped containment lines, but says this really was a rare case, and the vast majority of prescribed burns never see this problem. The fire is now 70% contained.
