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 why the fire cannot be fought directly.

Smoke was reported near the seam on the evening of Friday, Aug. 14. An Anderson fire engine and an Alaska forestry helicopter responded, and an aerial flight mapped the surface fire at about 71 acres, most active along two ridgetops east of the seam. No structures or other values are currently threatened, the division said.

"Coal seam fires create noxious gases and unstable ground, making direct firefighting near the seam unsafe," the Alaska Division of Forestry and Fire Protection said in its Saturday update. Suppression is limited to safely containing the surface fire. Helicopters dropped water on the fire in mid-May, 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, under the state's highest protection category.

Healy's coal field has thrown surface fires before, including nine coal seam fires in May 2015 that burned nearly 800 acres, and the 1,036-acre Popovich Creek 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, and Fairbanks Area forestry says it will keep monitoring.