Alaska DNR Forestry: Miller's Reach - 30 Years Later (Full Documentary)

That was the most extreme fire behavior that I'd ever seen. The fire had blown up, that the winds were pushing it as soon as we landed. It was like landing into like a war zone. The neighbor that was on the lake said it virtually exploded. It was gone in 15 minutes.

A full four bedroom house was to the ground. Nothing left.

The Miller's Reach fire is still the most destructive fire in Alaska's history. From these few chaotic days in June, many lessons were learned out of hundreds of people affected in the Big Lake area at the time. Here are some stories from residents and first responders. I was on the Helitack crew that went in for the initial attack. So we were the first load in.

From the time it was just 4 acres through the first day, first shift, which it got to about 64 acres. The tone out went out. We jumped on the ship and headed that direction. We had two engines en route as well. A load of smokejumpers jumped in.

We just went in and started. Left flank, right flank on the fire. I arrived kind of late into the first day, went to work on the fire, just putting hose lay along the flanks. We got around it that night, but it wasn't by any means contained or controlled. The winds came up the next day, right around lunchtime.

A pocket of spruce started torching out on the right flank near the head, pushing the fire back to the south, the opposite direction it was going the night before. And then we got the squad up and said, hey, let's get some water on this and start cooling these green islands so we don't have any spotting. And then the wind just picked up and I can remember you just hear the radio traffic everywhere on the fire. Hey, the wind's picking up. Hey, we've got a spot.

The jumpers were on it quick, trying to catch it, but they couldn't beat it down out of the trees. And it was pretty much off to the races. Then I went from literally just a few trees torching, which we got on in a hurry, to group torching and to a full running fire in under 15 minutes. I mean 15, 20 minutes. And it was off and running and something we weren't going to be able to catch.

We called for retardant and the helicopters and they dropped. The winds were just made it ineffective. The retardant blew, you know, 200ft past where they were trying to drop fire, bumped up against Miller's Reach road, jumped the road and then from there on it was just fairly continuous fuel.

Out toward Big Lake and just seeing a massive column Bent over. And then we started picking up the radio traffic that the fire had blown up, that the winds were pushing it. We loaded up in the helicopter, had plenty of fuel, and we flew direct to the fire. And then we were circling the column. The convection and the wind was so intense.

I just remember the helicopter bouncing all over the place and touching the plexus glass window. And it was hot to the touch. We landed in a gravel strip right off big lake road, Kind of by where Napa is unloaded. The helicopter took off to start doing bucket work. Seeing fire trucks from all over the Mat Su borough just converging and trying to get ahead of the fire.

There was evacuations in place, and eventually the manager came back and threw us in a pickup truck. And we started to go do structure triage. I remember embers falling down on us everywhere. And thinking we're like the. There's way too many structures for us to handle.

We ended up flying out and jumping out towards the head of the fire. Basically with the idea at that point that we were most likely just going to be trying to help with the evacuation and get people out of the way. It was one of the windiest jumps that I'd ever been on at that time. And since myself and my brother Philip broke off to start working with the jumpers packing hose. And we were utilizing a mark three out of the creek.

Hose clamps and a simple hose lay chasing the fire. And we just couldn't quite catch it. It was outpacing us by about a half a hose length to a full length. It seemed like. I think we probably worked till like maybe two or three in the morning, Just putting simple hose lay in hose clamp on the hose, trying to extend, trying to knock fire out of the trees.

We never quite could get up in front of it and catch it. Where we hit the ground first was an airstrip not too far down from here. We could see people trying to get out the road and of fire coming towards them. At that point, we got to the ground, went to the first structure that was at, which was a place that was under construction, and started getting people from there and down in the little neighborhood, Getting people out to the same airstrip that we landed on as kind of the safety zone. But the structure was already involved.

There was nothing we could do with it. But we saved a lot of houses by just being there. And the next day, putting out decks that run fire smoke. That first night, we were basically using buckets out of the river, Running around with a couple of small pumps and Some hose. Third day in.

The wind kept changing directions. Fire kept going in different directions. We ended up actually borrowing a pontoon boat, which turned out to be much more effective than driving down all these little driveways and to being able to cruise around the lake and you could see a house, see a structure, see if there was little fires going on around it. Hop off the boat, throw the pump in, get wire going and put the fire out that way. And for the rest of the day, Phil and I just ran from structure to structure.

Probably six, eight structures on that road. And I remember at one time there was a big log cabin that was unfinished and the smoke was so thick and we couldn't breathe. I just remember looking at Phil and Snot's running down his nose and his eyes are watering. And we crawled in the basement of that cabin and just laid on the concrete floor trying to get fresh air. There was a four wheeler in the front yard.

And this is all embers, right? It's all wind driven, so it's all embers. And we're working back on a shed. And I came back in the four wheelers on fire because an ember had landed on the seat. Eventually we went back to the big cabin and it was literally gone.

Nothing but a foundation. So we were probably a couple hours had passed. I still remember them saying, hey, it's. There's a fire down by Wasilla and it's. It's burning homes.

So you guys are going to watch this video before you get on this. Otter. Otter is a plane to fly into Willow. We could see the fire on the way in. As soon as we landed, it was like landing into like a war zone or what I had known of, what I had, you know, seen in the movies.

We went straight from the Little Otter plane right into a bus and went right out to the line. When we were walking out of the bus, the Copper river crew, they had just worked for like two or three days straight. You know, their eyes were just like. I just remember seeing like the whites of their eyes and their faces were all black. And he was like, our camp burnt over.

All of our stuff got burnt over. We were a very, very green crew, right? None of us had ever been on a fire before. Sarah had grown up around sled dogs and was asked to break from the crew and help a division supervisor in. A neighborhood seeing active fire, active homes burning down.

My job was to jump out of the truck and tie flagging at the end of people's driveways. At that time, I didn't know what that was marking. And then we ended up going to a large kennel of a dog musher that had like 60, 70 dogs. And the fire was coming and they had already loaded up as much as they could. And my job was just to run and just unlatch the dogs so at least they were running free.

You know, initially the fire behavior was kind of what you're used to. But then when the wind hit it, it was a whole different thing. Just moving it through the trees like that and trying to like catch it in the trees. And that kind of for me was like, you don't catch this with big picture stuff here. Aircraft retardant dozers.

Bigger thinking than just going after it with a, you know, a Fedco and a beater and a hose lace.

In 1996, the Big Lake area's population was a mix of full and part time residents. Horseshoe Lake had one narrow road in the road and homes were surrounded by thick black spruce. We were in our cabin. We could see the fire just across the lake. We heard on the radio they said it crossed Big Lake Road.

The wind shifted. The troopers came and banged on our cabin door. We had our two young children and two animals, two dogs and two vehicles. And we told us to evacuate. As soon as we got onto Big Lake Road, we were.

There was fire on both sides of the road. It was very scary. We ended up in Big Lake and it was black. I mean, you could hardly. It was really weird.

I mean, you couldn't see hardly any businesses. You couldn't see nothing. And, you know, we were just trying to get out of there. Talk about worry. We were just here on weekends.

We were in touch with neighbors by phone that were still here that hadn't evacuated. I had a friend fly us out. We took photographs from the air and the building we're in right now survived the fire. Has a red steel roof, so it was easy to identify four other structures that obviously had already burned. We were at our jobs in Anchorage.

And so when Doug came, told me about the results of the flight, I said, I want to go. So we waited for hours on the highway. Then we had to go to Houston High School and get permission from them before we could even come out here. And it was close to midnight by the time we got out here. It was very emotional.

Somebody started talking and my son said, please don't talk. Because we were all going through the emotions of what it looked like to us and what that meant when we knew we were coming to something that was gone. Devastation, you know, hardly any trees Alive and just like a war zone. It was terrible. When we got here, there were flames burning waist high around the trees and remaining the tundra around the roots of birch trees.

So we put the pump in the lake and started putting out the fires in our immediate area here. And there was no way we were gonn leave at 4 or 6. No. We worked until we were totally exhausted. Four days later we found out that our cabin didn't burn.

The whole property burned. All the black spruce trees and everything burned. But there was enough clearing around the old cabin and we had just put on new siding. And it had a good metal roof, so that is what saved it from burning. At the time, our road was one way in, one way out.

So they were not able to fight the fire on this side of the lake. Any structures that were not already fire wise were pretty much lost. We did have quite a bit of. Clearance, but we were still in a black spruce forest.

I had started a neighborhood directory because one of the things we found out is nobody knew how to get a hold of each other. The only way people knew whether their home had burned or not was they kept calling their phone. And if the answering machine picked up, they knew their house was still there. But that was really the only way that they knew how to get ahold of anyone. I actually learned about firewise almost 10 years later.

And that's when the community actually became a firewise community. We met twice a month and just kind of talked about issues and problems in the community. We got the road extended so there was two ways in and out. It's been a real benefit to the community in total firewise idea and the leadership that Kathy Kramer has shown in tying this community together. You couldn't see the road at all because of the density of the black spruce.

It was so dense that anybody who used the outhouse kept the door open. You don't have to clear cut your property to be firewise. Absolutely not necessary. Make sure that you have clearance around your structure, that you don't have trees hanging over your roof line. But keeping nice healthy pockets of trees.

You don't want the black spruce that are all touching each other. But if you keep them thinned out, you keep them limbed up, it can really look very nice. I would say being organized, you know, having, you know, one or two get togethers every year, informational and stuff and having a phone book fire pump, that's. About all the men there was around here was trying to get that fire pump going. Back then that was about all the.

People One fire pump on the whole lake and nobody could get it started. We have come a long way. While on our map it shows how many fire pumps that we have throughout the lake and where they're at. We're ready. We don't want to go through it again, but I think we could.

We could do a much better job now because we're organized. It's a constant job to prune your trees and get rid of the leaves and stuff. The ladder fuels the low boughs on some of the spruce. They're backing in. You need a core group of people that is committed to volunteer.

People love coming for chipping days, which is really funny. But they get out there and they're working together and we're laughing and talking to neighbors that maybe we haven't seen all summer. But we're out there dragging logs out. Of the ditch line and getting dirty. And it's fun to work together and see what we can accomplish together.

We can put in fuel breaks in a lot of places, but if the wind's blowing and fire is established, those fuel breaks can only do so much. What's going to help people out is. Is what we call hardening around their houses and getting their houses set up to where a fire comes through. It just goes by and doesn't bother their house. It's those little things around the house, around the places that catch on fire that need to be cleaned up and give you much better chance of having success.

The number of little fires we had on decks or in gutters or right next to the side of the house that if it had been removed, wouldn't have been there wouldn't have been a. Problem around the state. We began doing meetings with our cooperators in the spring, you know, to talk about training. We going to our fire stations and teaching fire line safety refreshers in Wildland and doing interagency joint training. We did live burns on the UAF field.

Just a lot more interagency training. We developed a communication plan that was interoperable between all departments, at least in the Mat Su area. Can all communicate. If we get a large fire and we develop plans for that in that. Era, we use a lot of call when needed, emergency call up help that were hard workers and did the best they could with what they had.

The crews we've developed since then are true professional fire crews. And they're equipped. They have the training. They have facilities to be able to support the mission that we have. People see the big flashy aircraft and helicopters and the air tanker behind me.

But what puts the fire out, what catches fires, is that the people, the boots on the ground, it takes extremely fit and just work. Hardened people that can go into some really scary situations and know how to do that, work safely. We don't ask people to do things that are unsafe, but we ask people to do dangerous things safely. And that's what those crews are trained for. People not knowing if they should leave their house, if they shouldn't leave their house, if they leave their house, where should they go?

It planted the seeds of what needed to change. Giving people the knowledge before a fire happens, all the information about firewise and what they can do with their property. It's a ready, set, go. Fires still happen, but. But we're able to inform the public and that's in the last 30 years.

I think it's just leaps and bounds. With the limited resources we have. We can't do it by ourselves. Everybody, I think, has something to offer. And that's what I've seen.

Years after that fire this last year, I watched all of the fire departments, both municipal and rural, stepping up to go help. Help. I saw statewide effort for We Protect Alaska.