Wallow fire update, June 13

Update at 7:45 p.m. MT, June 13, 2011:

The Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest Twitter account just sent out a link to an official Wallow fire update that reduces the acreage from this morning’s 452,155 to 448,620. But now that tweet and the latter document have apparently been deleted. InciWeb still says 454,155 acres. (Update: the June 13, 6:00 p.m. document was deleted and later restored with a modified acreage of 454,155.)

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Update at 11:50 a.m. MT, June 13, 2011:

Today’s 8:00 a.m. update from the incident management team was released at about 10:20 a.m on InciWeb.

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Firefighters on the Wallow fire in eastern Arizona and western New Mexico continued making progress on the fire Sunday. The fire grew by 9,000 acres but the containment percentage also grew, from 6% to 10%. There is conflicting information on the fire’s InciWeb site and there has been no official email update from the incident management team since Saturday morning. However, the Twitter account of the Area Command Team that is supervising four incident management teams (Reinarz, Pendleton, Hughes and Ponci) Tweeted at 9:03 a.m. Monday: “Wallow fire at 452,155 acres with 10% containment”. But at least the wildland fire agencies seem to have InciWeb working again this morning, which is an improvement over the frequent outages over the last few days. The national Situation Report has also been intermittent recently, but is working today.

Sunday night at 11:16 p.m. the backfire or burnout in New Mexico on the east side of the fire was in about the same place as it was Saturday night, having progressed approximately six miles, most of it along Jenkin Creek Road and Forest Road 220, working southeast toward the community of Luna, NM. It was still within about two miles of Luna.

A small portion of the main fire south of Highway 180 has crossed into New Mexico where the Blue River intersects the AZ/NM state line.

There was no major movement of the fire on the north, west, or south sides on Sunday. The fire continued to spread slowly on the south side and there were some areas on the east side south of Greer where the fire was very active.

Azcentral.com has a very cool interactive progression map of the Wallow fire. Unfortunately it is only current through June 10.

We did not hear anything about the DC-10 Very Large Air Tanker being used on the Wallow fire yesterday. There was an unconfirmed report on Facebook of it being requested to drop on a 1,600-acre fire in New Mexico near Raton Pass.

Below is a 3-D map of the east side of the Wallow fire. Click on it to see a larger version.

Author: Bill Gabbert

After working full time in wildland fire for 33 years, he continues to learn, and strives to be a Student of Fire. View all posts by Bill Gabbert