Coal seam fire northeast of Healy grows to 71 acres with no crew assigned

A fire on the Louise Creek coal seam 5 miles northeast of Healy has grown from about 1 acre in late June to roughly 71 acres, and no crew is assigned to it. The seam has burned underground for years, and the state says that is the reason the fire cannot be fought directly. It has also outgrown official tracking: Alaska's public 511 wildfire listing still shows the incident at 0.01 acre as of its last update Friday night, a figure that does not reconcile with the 71-acre estimate now reported by the interagency system and the state's Saturday update.

Smoke was reported near the seam on the evening of Friday, Aug. 14. An engine from Anderson and an Alaska Division of Forestry and Fire Protection helicopter responded, and an aerial reconnaissance flight mapped the surface fire at approximately 71 acres, with the most active burning along two ridgetops east of the seam. No structures or other values at risk are currently threatened, the division said.

"Coal seam fires create noxious gases and unstable ground, making direct firefighting near the seam unsafe," the division said in its Saturday update. Suppression is limited to safely containing the surface fire. Helicopters dropped water on the fire May 15, and later patrols found little or no visible flame before the June estimate of about an acre. The interagency system lists the fire as unstaffed and uncontained, with a management option of Full, the state's highest protection category.

Healy's coal field has thrown surface fires before, including nine coal seam fires in May 2015 totaling 795.7 acres, and the 1,036-acre Popovich Creek Coal Seam Fire in May 2024, whose crews reinforced firelines built for earlier blazes at Louise Creek. The agency said in 2015 that the underground fires are extremely difficult to extinguish and may burn for hundreds of years.

The ground belongs to the Alaska Mental Health Trust. Available records contain no comment from the Trust Land Office, and no Healy or Denali Borough resident appears in them: the account is entirely the fire agencies' own.

The helicopter patrolled other known seams in the area Friday and found no additional smoke. Fairbanks Area forestry says it will keep monitoring.