Incident Commander Discusses Elk Fire

Some containment has been made on the Elk Fire, but during this past weekend, the winds pushed some of the blaze in one direction. 

Winds associated with a cold front that passed through the area overnight Friday into Saturday, pushed some of the blaze in a southeastern direction, along the front face of the eastern side of the Bighorn Mountains.

Adding to the list of road closures is Big Goose Road at the intersection of Beckton Road, as the fire is approaching the headwater area of Big Goose Creek.

Casey Cheesbrough is the incident commander of the crews fighting the fire.

He says since his unit took over fire fighting efforts, crews have mostly been using a defensive approach, meaning they’ve gotten ahead of the fire and are trying to stop it from reaching certain points.

However the time may come soon, to go on the attack.

“I feel like now we have that opportunity with the conditions moderating here a little bit, the winds have died down, obviously it’s warm and dry, but with the shading that we’ve had from the other fires, it’s given us I feel like the break that we need to really look at the really big picture and see what our options are going to be with this fire.”

Cheesbrough says attacking does not necessarily mean a direct assault where the fire is.

He adds that is a misconception that the public sometimes has and explains what the most common misconception is.

“The initial perception is that firefighters are going to go on every piece of that ground and truly suppress the fire. What we found when we do that, is we waste a lot of our valuable time, our resources, our energy, into things that ultimately aren’t going to be successful. We can only go so far, before that next weather event that’s going to come over and move the fire a significant distance and if we’re not prepared further out, we’ll either have damage or loss with those really critical values and that’s a failure to us.”

Cheesbrough also says there have been a few issues with the public flying drones near the fire areas.

He’s asking that these activities cease, because it could result in all types of flights in the area to be temporarily grounded.

Also at Sunday night’s public meeting in Ranchester, Sheridan County Sheriff Levi Dominguez says emergency crews may start using the Emergency Alert System to notify the public about evacuations.