The Glacier Reporter has an excellent article describing some of the firefighting and evacuation management during the wildfires last week near Browning, Montana that burned about 18,000 acres. Here are a couple of excerpts:
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“The fire was just taking off,” [Blackfeet Homeland Security Director Robert] DesRosier continued. “I was just behind [Browning Fire Chief] Dustin Boggs, and what I saw was just amazing. It was moving so fast with the wind, around 40 to 50 miles per hour, across the prairie, so I made the call to evacuate the Boarding Dorm. That was the main priority, to get the Boarding Dorm evacuated, but high winds dominated and everything was happening so fast that we only had about 30 minutes to pull it off.”
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…It was then that DesRosier got a call to return to Browning and set up an Incident Command Center at the Blackfeet Fire Cache. The Blackfeet Tribe designated the Tribal Offices as a temporary shelter for evacuees. “That’s a great community story right there,” said DesRosier. “I assumed Area Command because that’s when we heard about the Y Fire, so I had to divide resources.”
The second major conflagration began just west of the junction of U.S. Highways 2 and 89, called the “Y,” and eventually ran east over about 17 miles of prairie. DesRosier appointed separate Incident Commanders at each fire and designated the resources to be sent out.
“It went really smoothly, to divide the resources but still do the evacuations and warnings because life and safety are the number one priority – all our efforts are set to protect human life, then property,” DesRosier said.
Some of the Indian Nations in Montana have a pretty good reputation for being ahead of the curve on Emergency management. Some of them have actually embraced ICS and take it seriously.