Alaska DNR Forestry: MUKLUK FIRE OPERATIONS BRIEFING - August 22, 2026

Good morning, my name is Dave Davis, Operations Chief with the Alaska Incident Management Team here on the Muckluck Fire in Tok, Alaska, and I'm going to give you your Saturday, August 22nd operational briefing. We'll start off with a quick overview of the last 24 hours. Yesterday had moderated conditions across the fire area. Again, we woke up yesterday to some, to some precip overnight and early morning, and, and that kept things kind of in check throughout the day. We did see some little pockets of increased activity in the afternoon hours, some, some isolated torching, but otherwise it was fairly quiet across the fire area.

We did, we did put some containment on the map yesterday over on the east side where the fire burned into the 1990 Tok Burn. We have dozer line along that, and, and the east flank, uh, within that footprint of the old 1990 Tok Burn is looking really good. I will address that further up towards the Tanana River, out on the, uh, the far east finger there, there still is heat. They were able to get dozer line around that almost all the way up to the Tanana River. They'll have crews in there working today, but that is an area that, that there still is some heat and some potential that we'll talk about here in a minute.

Also yesterday we had, again, as we've had every day here, the bulk of the resources down in the area between Red Fox and Al Cannon and Sundrog Trail and 5th Street there. Still continues to be a lot of work in and around the remaining structures there, as well as securing the dozer lines that have been established in there. You know, those, those areas are, uh, we're taking a lot of precautions with our responders in there working around some of the hazards that exist in there with hazmat. Um, of course there's, uh, you know, there's just a lot of debris, um, burning tires, plastics, things of that nature that, uh, you know, we just try to be very, very cognizant around how we engage with that. And it also presents, uh, certainly a, a risk to any public that goes back in there and tries to take, um, you know, any independent action around their properties.

So that's something to be certainly heads up for. On the west side of the fire yesterday, there was really good work there. Happy to report the dozers pushed all the way up here to the north and tied into a kind of a marshier area where the fire is just on its own accord hung itself up in some less burnable vegetation there, and we had crews in there working and It's going to be a long, a lot of work to get this secured, but, but there is a dozer line along that fire's edge, and now we just need to go back in and mop it up. For today, a lot of our efforts are focused down here in what we're calling Division Whiskey, but really this southwest portion where we've— there's still a lot of work, and we've got some forecasted winds coming in over the fire area tomorrow. So a change in the weather pattern, we're expecting some northwesterly winds tomorrow throughout the burn period.

And so we've, we've augmented our resources down here. We've pulled folks off of the, off of the western flank, reinforced folks down here, and really trying to get all of this in, in a good place to receive that wind tomorrow, knowing that we've got trees that are going to want to topple over and residual heat in here. So you'll see today an increased presence in there with responders. We also had 2 new crews come in yesterday. We had Gannett Glacier and Fairbanks 1.

They returned from the lower 48, so we've bolstered our numbers there. So we've got our work cut out there. Additionally, we did have folks up on the Tanana River yesterday. They'll be up in that area again today. We found and secured the spot fires.

We've got some UAS folks that are going to go up there and fly, make sure we have no more up there. And then there's also some cabins out here in the, in the vicinity of the Old River Road, Tanana River, that, that'll get some protection measures taken on that as well. So a lot of moving parts, but, but happy to report things are, are moving along in the right direction. Expect to see a little bit of increased fire activity today. We haven't had that overnight precipitation.

We expect maybe a little sunnier skies today, a little lower relative humidities, so we would anticipate seeing a little bit more fire activity today. But we're feeling pretty good about where we're at at this moment and really getting ourselves ready for being tested with the northwest winds tomorrow.

Evacuation levels remain the same as they have, no change there, and with that we'll end there and talk to you all again tomorrow. Thank you.