Knight Fire grows to more than 1,300 acres

The Knight Fire, burning in the Middle Fork Stanislaus River Canyon near Mount Knight, more than doubled in size from Tuesday to this morning.  As of today, the fire had scorched 1,332 acres.

“This fire is burning in very steep terrain with heavy timber and lots of underbrush providing continuous fuel,” said Debbie Santiago, lead public information officer for the South Central Sierra Interagency Incident Management Team.
 

Personnel has grown to 658 firefighters staged in Hess Meadow, a few miles south of the fire.  Aiding the firefighters are six air tankers, 10 helicopters, 27 fire engines, two water tenders and seven bulldozers.

“There are some real heroes out there,” Santiago said. “They are working with poison oak, rattlesnakes, rocks and brush taller than they are. We don’t want to see anyone killed.”

So far, there have been no injuries or structures burned.

Flames reached within a quarter-mile of the remote Mount Knight subdivision, consisting of about 30 cabins, but were controlled before they reached the cabins. The area was evacuated Monday.

Personnel are coming from a broad swath of agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, Cal Fire and several local fire departments.

“We’ve got folks from all over the place,” said Nancy Longmore, information officer with the management team.
 On Tuesday, crews carved a dozer line from the southwest corner of the fire across Mount Knight in a southeasterly direction. Today, a secondary line, behind the primary line, is being etched into the forest northeast of the fire.

“We may have to go over two or three ridges away from Mount Knight to find a safe anchor site,” Santiago said.

Crews are battling multiple spot fires, she added. There is no estimated date of containment.

The firefighters’ main objective is to not let the fire cross the Middle Fork of the Stanislaus River and spread into Calaveras County, said Lee Bentley, public information officer sent in from the Southern California Fire Interagency Management Team.

The broad plan is to keep the fire south of the river, north of Contention Ridge, west of Sandbar Flat Campground and east of Forebay, Bentley said.

If the fire burned to those boundaries it would cover about 6,000 acres, he said.

So far, costs to fight the fire are nearing $1 million.

After last year’s fire season that started early and ended late, some were hoping to escape another scorching fire season.

Santiago said this is the first fire of the summer that has brought the incident management team, which is made up of personnel from many agencies, together.    

“A few weeks ago, our folks were getting a little bored,” she said. “Some of them were saying they needed a fire to fight, and I told them to watch out what they hoped for.”   

Longmore said that historically August and September are the worst months for wildfire in the area — the Stanislaus Complex Fire, which scorched 137,000 acres, occurred in September 1987. And fuels are drying up with recent heat waves.

“We’re just entering into the worst of the fire season,” Longmore said.