A managed fire that was started in June and was barely smouldering last week turned into a large problem for the Scofield Mountain home subdivision over Sunday night to Monday morning.
On Sunday crews were battling the blaze but overnight strong winds came up and created spotting beyond the boundaries of the fires determined burn area and a number of full time families along with some summer residents have been evacuated.
According to Hal Stevens, the Manti LaSal National Forest duty officer for Monday last nights wind event took the fire to a new level.
“Yesterday it was kind of rough, but by last night things were looking much better,” he told the Sun Advocate on Monday morning. “But overnight there were some big winds and calls started coming in that the fire was a problem.”
Stevens said a few days ago the forest service had decided the fire had done its job and that they were going to work on putting it out. They began that process with some ground personnel, engines and a helicopter.
“Right now we have the incident command system in place and we have one ground crew, two wildfire engines and a helicopter battling the blaze,” he said. “We are presently in the process of locating on site a number of structure fire engines, three more hand crews and have a type two helicopter on its way to help us.”
A type two helicopter is larger than the standard helicopters used to carry fire retardant and water. They were used extensively on the fire in Mathis Canyon (off Willow Creek Canyon) three years ago when that blaze was classified at the top of the priority list for a few days.
A strike team of with five more engines has also been ordered to help out.
Evacuation taking place in Scofield
"A managed fire that was started in June and was barely smouldering last week turned into a large problem for the Scofield West subdivision over Sunday night to Monday morning. "