An ounce of prevention…

On Friday afternoon there was a little bit of a debate about which fire was sending a huge plume into the air above Alpine County.

Some folks thought the East Fork Fire had rekindled, others that it was the Henry Fire, that grew to 1,000 acres on Friday morning as it was being managed.

No one expected the culprit to be the Tamarack Fire, which up until Friday afternoon had been smoldering since it was first reported on July 4.

On Friday, nearly two weeks later, the fire was raging down Pleasant Valley toward Markleeville and destroying structures near Shay Creek along the way.

The only reason Markleeville is still standing is because firefighters rushed in and made a successful stand, keeping the historic town essentially intact through four nights when the fire continued to burn around it.

It’s likely the fire was sparked in the July 1 electrical storm that gave us the East Fork Fire, but it was in a spot that Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest supervisors didn’t expect had a potential for spread.

That was clear around July 10 when they announced the decision not to insert a fire crew due to safety concerns because it was surrounded by granite, a small lake and not much fuel.

But on July 16, it caught the wind in its sails and it just kept going.

That decision already cost people their homes, Alpine County large swaths of forest and $5 million.

A bucket of water from the helicopter that was buzzing around the Henry Fire could have dampened the foliage around it enough to keep it down until someone had time to dump another bucket.

There will come a reckoning in connection with this fire. But the priority right now should be to get it contained and out, and people back in their homes.

Then we can begin to examine the decision making process that let a very small fire, grow to a very big one.