Alaska DNR Forestry: MUKLUK FIRE OPERATIONS BRIEFING -August 19, 2026

Good evening, my name is Rob Allen. I'm the incident commander for the Mukluk Fire here in Tok. I will start with the fire and then move around to some other important news for today. Good day on the fire again today. We got a little bit of a break from the wind this morning.

We're able to have a lot of our resources in and around the area between the Alaska Highway and Red Fox Road working in and around the structures in there, securing that area. Making sure that fire can't get out any farther from that and also securing around the homes that are in that section there.

Lots of resources came in last night. We're able to reorganize them, get a much bigger workforce out there. We're probably almost at 200 people now on the fire. The other news that, that by having some extra folks and getting the dozer line down and around and through the community is we're now out to work out on the edges and keep the fire from coming back around into the town of Tok and threatening the highway. Out in the east flank, we've got the fire burning into the 1990 burn scar.

It's slowed down quite a bit when it hits in there. It's a different fuel type than it is on the west side of the fire, but we have been keeping an eye on that. We used some water scooping aircraft in there to check up the fire today. Going around the top, we've had some folks out looking along the river. We did get a spot out on one of the islands in the river today.

We used helicopters to knock that down, and as we get people out to patrol the river, as we get more resources in, we'll be taking a look at that and also coming up with protection plans for the allotments and cabins that are along the Tanana. Coming back down the west side, a lot of great progress in there again today. Also, we've had dozers going as direct as they can. We did have all of the aircraft that we brought up from the lower 48. That's 4— well, we only had 3 air tankers working today.

We'll have 4 tomorrow. Along with the water scooping aircraft, have been building line ahead of 6 dozers that are pushing line heading out to the, towards the Tanana River. We're looking for a good spot out here where the fuel changes to be able to tie that into and keep that also from coming to the west, circling back around, and again threatening the highway and the back end of Tok. Weather's been in our favor for that here the last couple of days with the wind coming out of the south and pushing the fire towards the the river. We did see this morning, um, a little bit of an east wind, uh, that did push a lot of smoke down the highway and into Tanacross.

Um, that's going to happen off and on as this thing keeps moving back and forth, uh, but the predicted winds for today and tomorrow will continue to be from the south. Uh, we do expect there's an opportunity tomorrow maybe for some thunder cells to build up over the mountains, uh, north of us that might give us some off-flow wind that might push some smoke and some fire back towards us, but we're planning for that. And then coming into the weekend, looking at the better chance of having a weather change and the winds flipping around to the north, and that'll then impact us along the road here. One of the other things we did do today, um, we did an in-brief today with the Alaska Incident Management Team that will be taking over the fire at 7 o'clock tomorrow morning. That'll allow us to pull our initial attack resources back, get them rested, get them set up.

We're still hot and dry in the Tok area and out into Delta, and we want to be ready for the next one also. We also did work with the state EOC on our evacuation map. As you can see here, we've worked our way through our ready, set, go process. We did shrink up the, the go area just a little bit because of the success we've had with the dozer line in there, and we'll be evaluating that every day to the point where we can turn that notification off and put everybody back into a SET in case the road moves. But the colors here start out, obviously the red is a GO.

Everything in yellow is a SET. That's an area that we think if the fire does pick up either from the north or one of these areas starts to push out, we'd have to get people into a READY. So we want them to be set, get them in a SET so that they're ready to go. And then before that, we'd have everybody that's out here in the other outlying areas that'll still be— it could be impacted by this fire if we had a strong south wind. Into a ready position.

We'll continue to have resources coming in over the next couple of days. So we've had two crews on the road right now. Two more crews will be coming in hopefully tonight or first thing tomorrow morning, and that'll give us much more horsepower to work out. We've got this fire now broken out into four divisions, so we have leadership working in four different quadrants around the fire. They'll get in, start really emphasizing trying to get into those areas and secure the houses.

The other person, the other group that we're working closely with is the, is the power company. They've been in there right now working on trying to get the power line set up and tapped back in. It's hazardous for them also. All of this is mostly black spruce. Now the fire has gone through, those root systems have been damaged, and all those trees are falling down.

If you've been in that area, which we encourage you not to go to, to give the firefighters a little bit of opportunity to move around and respond to flare-ups. But as these things fall over, they fall in hot pockets. Flares— we get flare-ups, they keep falling down. DOT is working really hard to keep the roads open, constantly moving, picking up roads, and the power company is doing the same thing, trying to get in there and work. But it's, it's slow, hazardous work right now, and will continue to be until the trees kind of stabilize.

I just want to thank everybody in the community, all the firefighters that showed up and helped us out here. The folks in the community have been getting great support from them. The food, the water, the, uh, thank yous as we've been cruising around. Appreciate the Alaska team being here and being able to step up and take us over and give us a little more management on this fire. And, uh, hopefully we'll get this wrapped up, uh, soon.

Thanks.