HELENA — With almost 500 personnel members on the Horse Gulch Fire, crews are doing everything they can to bring the fire under containment.
Jason Forthofer is the Division Supervisor on Northern Rockies Team 2, a Complex Incident Management Team. He says that switching to this type of larger team allows for greater resources and the most experienced firefighters in the business to tackle this fire.
“Tens of management people to allow us to really coordinate all the resources on the fire and do things like get hundreds of people food and gas and lodging and things like that in addition to bringing more firefighting resources to the fire," says Forthofer.
Forthofer says that there is a silver lining in the fire happening now compared to if it would have occurred later in the season.
“We were really able to hit this fire pretty hard with ground and air resources whereas, you know, if the summer continues like it is right now and we have a lot of fires throughout the region that the resources do get stretched thin," says Forthofer.
Their top priority is to keep homes and people safe. As of Monday afternoon, the fire evacuation order was changed to an evacuation warning, allowing residents to come and go to their property. Forthofer says that evacuees who choose to stay on their property during an evacuation order can interfere with their ability to fight a fire properly.
“It can cause us to devote resources to not fighting and trying to stop the fire but instead having to try to, you know, protect those people and evacuate those people,” says Forthofer.
As for this Monday evening, if conditions allow, they plan to ignite areas around the fire to the northeast in order to burn potential fuels.
“Up until this point, we've really focused our efforts on protecting the communities. And so, we've been successful there. We have a lot of really solid fire line in now and secured the fire closest to the communities, and now we're working our way around the outer perimeter of the fire trying to knock it all down, you know, prevent spread in the future," says Forthofer.
