Alaska DNR Forestry: Tok Community Meeting for the Mukluk Fire, August 18

That's a good one. All right, my name is Emery Johnson. I'm the Public Information Officer for the Division of Forestry and Fire Protection. Thank you so much for gathering to let us speak upon the fire that has pushed through your guys' community. We do have a couple people that are going to speak, and then towards the end we will be taking questions.

We do have a lot of representation here to be able to give you the information that you guys really need. Okay, um, so first things first, again, welcome. We have a lot of resources in the back, um, from the Division of Forestry and Fire Protection as well. We will kick it off with, um, Rob Allen here in a second, and he is our Regional Fire Management Officer for the Northern Region. We will have Jake Livingston here as the incoming IC, uh, Incident Commander for the Alaska team that's taken over come in the next coming days.

We also have representation from the State Emergency Operations Center with Faith over here. We have Jeremy Douse, who is our Director for Division of Forestry and Fire. Cato Howard, local fire management officer. We do have representation from Senator Cronk. Thanks for coming.

And we do have representation, James, from the power company for questions. So we will kick it off with an operational update, and then we'll follow up with more details. And again, we will let you guys have the opportunity towards the end for questions. We are recording this, so we will be able to post it online. We're going to post it on our Facebook page for Division of Forestry and Fire, as well as our YouTube, since there's not a lot of Facebookers, but it will be posted for later as well.

Okay, we're going to kick it off with Rob Allen. Thank you, Emery, and thanks everybody. She said my name is Rob Allen. I'm the Northern Region Fire Management Officer, so Fairbanks, Delta, and Tok are the areas that I am responsible for. And we'll just kind of get you set this tone where we were with this.

As you all know, it's been hot and dry here in Tok for, well, all summer. We had the last couple days, we've had some extreme conditions here in our indices that we're looking at as we're looking at where we are for fire behavior.

As is usual, happens most of the years, Tok is the last area, one of the last areas in the state to go out of fire season. It's the last to come in and the last to go out. So the rest of the state's been under quite a bit of rain all summer long. We've had a record low fire acreage year, but we're right up there on top with number of responses that we've gone to. So we've had an average number of fires in the state We've been very aggressive at keeping them smaller, so we've had less acreage and we've had a much better season overall.

With that, the Lower 48, as you understand and probably see, is having a historic fire season themselves. And part of the way the wildland fire season works is we usually start off early, people come up from the Lower 48 to help us out. When we get cold and rainy, we send people down to help them out. So the state had gone into our drawdown method where we make sure that we have enough stuff around to take care of our fires here. At the same time, we provide as many operational assets as we can to the Lower 48 to help out down there as they're trying to get through their season also.

We were in that stage here the last couple weeks. We've been paying attention to, to the Tok area, and Copper Center is also another area that's been very hot and dry. It's a part of what we like to pay attention to is the state of Alaska. And working with our federal partners, making sure that we could have a response when we needed it. We did have a burn suspension in place for the last 2 weeks here.

We have been keeping an eye on things. We've been moving resources around as rain starts in one place, we move it around. We've been very busy in the Fairbanks area with the Totatnikka Fire that's been pushing a lot of smoke and a lot of energy into the Fairbanks area, Nenana, Healy, parts of Delta. You've had some smoke here from that fire until this one started, and then we got this one started. Um, I was on the phone immediately with Cato when he had felt, uh, their computers shut off and shut back on.

They knew that it was a power line issue. They went out right away to take a look, and by the time they got from the station to their vehicles, the fire was called in. By the time they got to the fire, it was 15 acres and going through to 20. One of the things that we've been watching here, even though it's been hot and dry in Delta and Tok and Delta for most of the summer, we hadn't had wind. And this was the component that threw us into here with the wind that came on now.

So that as our drawdown plan is set, the Tok resources responded to the fire. Started trying to pick it up as close as they could, had their helicopter engaged. We sent the helicopter over from Fairbanks to come this way to help. The resources in Delta came this way to help. Copper River came up to help.

We ended up pulling engines off the Kenai, off of the Matsu area, and Fairbanks all collapsed into this area to start helping to pick that up. As it happened throughout the night, they started right in this area in here, started moving forward. Every time they got where they were starting to get close to getting something happen, a wind would come in, a pulse would hit them, they'd have to pull back out. It was too hot for them to stay in there. They'd pull back out, move down to the next road, try to get re-engaged, kept pushing them over until we ended up where we are now.

We're still very much— and this is one of those ones that will set up the team that's coming in after us. There'll be better maps. We'll get better intel out. We'll get better numbers on— structures in there that have been lost. Right now we've been too busy trying to save the structures that are still there to get a good count on what has happened inside that footprint.

All our focus has been today, for the most part, is everything inside that area from the Alaska Highway to Fox, um, Red Fox, and trying to keep those homes that are still in there protected as we've been trying to build fire line to keep it from coming out of those two areas anyplace else. Just about an hour ago, the first air tankers showed back up in the state. We got them fired up. We're building line out of— off of Fox Road heading towards the Tanana River, and we're building retardant line out there to keep the dozer lines going. There's potential in the next couple of days for some lightning, and if we get some outflow winds from the lightning and this pushes back around, we're back to another problem.

So to control that edge here. So we spent today bringing in more resources. As of right now, actually, they're still just coming down the road. We've got 4 crews coming from Dawson, from Canada, to help. We've got the 2 Q400 air tankers in today.

We got 2 air tacks in today. We had 1 yesterday, 2 today. 2 More air— 2 more tanker aircraft have showed up. 2 Water scooping aircraft are overnighting in Whitehorse and will be here tomorrow. We're bringing back our crews that have been in the Lower 48, so we have 4 of them will be trickling in over the next 2 days to start filling up in here.

The task force of engines came up from, um, Girdwood, Chugiach, Anchorage, and the Matsu. So those engines all arrived a little bit, they're out on the fire right now, as well as more wildland fire engines that have been rolling in today. We've got 4 helicopters that are assigned to fire right now. Today, the big mission with them, even though we didn't have the, uh, the air tankers, a lot of the work today was in this neighborhood. And the helicopters being able to drop buckets right in and around the homes is what was most effective for us today.

We had a really good day of being able to hang on to this and keep that going forward. Um, we've got more assets, like I said, coming in. The big shift that you'll see between now Tomorrow, Jake Livingston, who is the Chief of Fire Operations for Division of Forestry— he's my boss, so I'm trying to do a good presentation here— will be bringing one of the Alaska Complex Incident Management teams in. They've been starting to slowly trickle in. We brought some of them in yesterday to start doing that.

So we're really on that today, still focused on initial attack, still trying to figure out what we have out there, trying to get an anchor point established to get moving forward. As Jake's team rolls in and starts to move up, you'll see a lot more progression as we start putting some line on the map and getting some things secured. I think I'll stop there and let Jake talk a little bit about their gut feeling.

Hello everybody, as Rob said, my name is Jake Livingston. I'm the incident commander with Alaska Team 1. Just a little bit about myself, so I live lived the last 25 winters in Fairbanks, and as Rob said, I work for the Alaska Division of Forestry and Fire Protection. With the team, we have about— we have 40 people coming in with my team, and they work for several state and federal agencies throughout the state of Alaska. And we are slotted to take over command of the fire on Thursday morning at 7 AM.

We have already started showing up, obviously some of our operation— operational firefighters, they're already integrating with the firefighters that were here since the beginning. They're already starting to exchange information and look at the plans on the ground. So really what we are planning on doing is just building off of what has already been established. Here with, with, uh, Rob and Cato and all the people working for them. And, uh, you know, just keeping those priorities of life, property, residences going directly after the edge of this fire, keeping it as small as possible.

And then, you know, the other thing that we like to do is just make sure we continue to provide all the information that we can to the community and the public. So that's That's our plan moving forward, and just look forward to working here, helping out, and appreciate your hospitality. We are going to be right inside your community, and we're aware of that. So, you know, I look forward to working with you.

I'll just add one part too. Before we hear from our risk management folks is that we did put a pretty good size evacuation box in right away. One of the things we'll be doing now is we've had an opportunity to get some ground established. We'll be looking at shrinking the box. We'll also be adding in some other set and go areas as we look what the wind is going to be doing and the fire behavior that might be potentially hitting us in the next—.

Good evening everybody, my name is Faith Kleida. I represent the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, and we shorten that to Alaska Emergency Management. We are here to support the fire teams that are doing everything to keep your homes—. I can't hear you back here, Faithy, speak up. I will do my best, I'm sorry, I don't project very well.

Right now my role here is to help anyone with impacted homes make sure that you you get registered for some of the things that have been turned on with the Governor's declaration today. If anyone is unaware, Governor Dunleavy has declared a state of disaster for the area. Specifically, it's the Alaska Gateway Regional Education Area, and that covers this area for Tok. So the part of those programs that are turned on with this disaster are public assistance and individual assistance, which I think is the majority of folks in this room that will be impacted. Individual assistance—.

There's a few ways to get registered. You can register online, ready.alaska.gov. There's also a phone number. All this information should be available on the flyer in the back of the room. I'm told it should be with the resources back there.

And then also, depending on how this process goes, once we identify needs, once the situation has been deemed safe by our fire teams and we can get in and do more assessments, and figure out what damages have been done to homes, we'll be able to move forward with making sure, if needed, people will be here to help get registered. All of that stuff can be— will be disseminated here in the future, but I just want to make sure everybody is aware that the declaration is active right now. And I guess with that, I wanted to open it up for questions if there was no one else. Okay, never mind then. Sure.

Yeah, the people doing the work on the ground are these people over here. My job is to make sure we have the resources in Tok. So yesterday, I, when I was driving back to Tok, we got a hold of the governor, who within 10 minutes I had calls from the commissioners that are overseeing these places. And what do we need to do? And I said we need all the resources we can get.

And so I think we're getting those resources. And the governor did say he was going to do a declaration, which he did today, and then that will hopefully— hopefully people start working with people of what that actually entails and what it covers for people. I got a phone call from Senator Dan Sullivan this morning, and so he is looking at the federal aspect. He wants FEMA to be down here to be involved. So that's my job, is to make sure that we have the resources, the state resources, the federal resources, and for these guys to do their job and protect our homes and families.

So, um, that's where we're at with that, and I expect the full cooperation from the state and the federal side to be here for the people of Tok. Great, thank you so much. Um, another thing, we do want to thank the Red Cross for supporting, as well as you guys supporting each other in the community and rallying together. We always see Tok doing that, and, um, it's appreciated, it's seen. We have multiple donation sites around Tok, um, this one included, and then the Tok School as that evacuation shelter.

We've got a lot of people that came together to support, and, uh, we do recognize that you guys did a majority of that workload being the first responders for your guys' community. Um, we will, um, give you guys the opportunity for some questions, um, to reiterate some of the things. Uh, we do have life and property as our primary objectives. We are on day 2 of an active firefight, and so we are in initial attack, and so we do appreciate you guys working with us and coming together to get more information. Um, we do have Division of Forestry and Fire Protection people integrated in this community that you guys know personally.

We have, um, just like you guys in the community and those in the community that work for us, have experienced devastating loss. So that's something, um, that's experienced here and for the division, as well as it rings true for the entire state. So we are rallying together for that as well. We will be able to take questions. I do understand that it is a little hard to hear in the back, so we may have to reiterate some of these questions, okay?

But we want to make sure that we get the.