Containment increases in Eagle Creek Fire

Editor’s note: This version corrects the size of the fire in the subheadline.

Work on the Eagle Creek Fire continues with the firefighting perimeter continuing to grow.

The perimeter was estimated at 40 percent Sunday and the Inciweb reporting site Tuesday reported the perimeter 60 percent contained.

The site has reported the size of the fire at 7,225 acres since Sunday evening.

Incident Commander Robert Smith said Tuesday the land crews are primarily working on the edges to establish a perimeter with the focus on the northwest edge and also on the eastern edge.

Helicopters continue to drop water, with fixed-wing aircraft primarily coordinating the helicopters for the last five or six days, he said.

Smith said the weather, after the first day - the fire was discovered last Wednesday afternoon - has cooperated.

The hot, windy day of the first day of the fire made the initial attack difficult.

The first day, "it burned up quite a bit of stuff, but after that its been pretty low fire severity," Smith said.

He said the damage has been spotty, with burning in kind of a mosaic pattern, and quite a bit of the trees have survived.

He added that the area includes a lot of wetter trees like aspen that don't burn as easily.

"That's held up pretty well from it," he said.

Smith said he hopes by the end of the week to have a perimeter established, but the fire will be burning, with areas putting up smoke in random spots, for some time.

"Until it does get a foot of snow or at least a good week of wetting, slow rain," he said.

Smith and Frickel warned that people should not try to come out to the fire, for safety reasons and also to avoid interfering with the firefighters.

Beaver Creek Highway - Montana Secondary Highway 234 - is restricted to people who live in the area and to emergency traffic only south of Bear Paw Lake, aka Second Lake, and a checkpoint is staffed to prevent unauthorized traffic at the entrance to Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation.

The two also said drones cannot be flown into the fire zone because that causes problems with the helicopters and airplanes fighting the fire.

Frickel said the reservation did some evacuations in its Sandy Creek Reservoir the first day of the fire - she was not sure if people had been allowed to return - but no other evacuations occurred.

Overnight camping is banned on Beaver Creek Park south of Taylor Road, and the park did issue an evacuation warning last week, but no evacuations have occurred there.

Frickel said people also need to keep an eye on air quality. Masks are not required, but people with breathing problems could have issues with the smoky air.

She and Smith also said much of the smoke in the area actually is coming from fires in the west, such as California and Oregon.

Frickel also said the teamwork between the orginazations has been amazing. U.S. Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs Forestry, Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, Fish, Wildlife and Parks, The Chippewa Cree Tribe, multiple volunteer fire departments and Havre Fire Department all have responded.

"It's nothing but cooperation on all sides," she said.

Local landowners also provided assistance.

"The first couple of days we had tremendous amount of landowners with water tanks and trucks and equipment," she said.

Now primarily landowners on the edge or in the fire are assisting, although they get calls daily asking if they need assistance, she said.

One thing they didn't need help for was the cattle in the area, she said, which have moved away from and stayed away from the fire.

"it turns out that in this particular fire, the cattle were smart," Frickel said.