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Firefighters Battle 30-plus Wildfires in West

Aired July 26, 2002 - 14:10   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Firefighter are racing against the clock in the West, where more than 30 large wildfires are burning. The fires, each more than 500 acres, are racing across Alaska, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Washington, and Oregon.

You can even see the smoke from space. This is a satellite image here of the smoke over Oregon, the state hardest hit, with 15 wildfires.

The situation is perhaps most dire in California, where a 60,000- acre wildfire is threatening a grove of ancient sequoia trees.

CNN's James Hattori joins us now live from Kernville with the latest on that -- James.

JAMES HATTORI, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Kyra, all the attention right now, fire certainly is big concern. Right now, at this hour, the attention is focused in Fresno, California, where the the person who is suspected of starting this fire is being arraigned at this hour. At least that's what was scheduled. She's identified as 45-year-old Peri Van Brunt from Bakersfield, which is a city just west of where we are right now.

She was taken in custody Wednesday and transported to Fresno yesterday. These are -- I think with have some footage of her arriving in court in Fresno this morning. She's scheduled to be there at -- was scheduled to be there about 11:00 local time. That was about eight or nine minutes ago. We

have footage of where the McNalley fire, which this is being called, started Sunday afternoon. It was about 15 miles north of here, at a place called the Road's End Resort. A yellow crime tape indicates where the Van Brunt campfire allegedly was blown out of control Sunday afternoon. Witnesses say she fled the scene. The resort was later destroyed by the blaze.

The flames spread from there quickly over the first couple of days. As of the last update, as you mentioned, now 60,000 acres destroyed, 1,500 firefighters now on the lines, plus a fleet of helicopters, aerial bombers, and bulldozers. Officials say they've established 10 percent of a containment line around the McNalley blaze. We have map to give you an idea of the area we're talking about. Much of the firefighting effort is being focused on the western flank of the fire to protect towns like Ponderosa and Johnsondale -- also to protect 11 groves of those majestic giant sequoia trees. Flames have come as close as one or two miles to some of those groves. Officials say they are making good progress protecting those areas, and maybe in a day or two they'll be able to move on to other flanks of the fire.

So again, the arraignment, we understand, is underway at this hour for Peri Van Brunt. She's described as a mother of two, married, currently unemployed -- and at least that's the information we are told. The question is what charges will be brought up against her. That's up to U.S. Attorney. And we've yet to hear what specifically has been filed -- Kyra.

PHILLIPS: James, real quickly, we've mentioned the sequoias, but lately haven't talked about the importance of these trees. Let's talk about what they do for the ecosystem.

HATTORI: I'm not an ecology expert, but I do know that what's most striking about them is their unusualness. They're some of the biggest living things on the Earth. And oldest. Some of them have been around 1,000, 1,500 years; that's just mind boggling. They're huge. Up to 300 feet. Some of the trunks are 60 feet, even 100 feet around. Some of them you can drive through.

So I think just the fact that they are so rare and the fact that they have this built-in resilience -- they've survived fires in the past. The concern is this fire because underbrush has grown up around them, which is an unnatural sort of thing because they have a tendency to put out fires in forests and sort of disrupt the ecosystem. The fire now could really do some damage by getting higher into the sequoias, where they are more susceptible to fire, and perhaps kill them.

PHILLIPS: James, I don't know, that sounded pretty good. I think you've been studying your environmental issues.

James Hattori, thank you very much.

Well, in Oregon, nearly a dozen firefighters narrowly escaped injury when flames overran crews battling the state's largest wildfire.

John Becker from CNN affiliate KGW has that story.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN BECKER, KGW REPORTER (voice-over): Suffering from smoke inhalation and minor burns, 11 firefighter undergo treatment at hospital in (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Really shaken them up mentally.

BECKER: Overrun by a late-afternoon blowup like this on the Toolbox Fire in southern Oregon, a 20-man crew wrapped themselves in their fire shelters, a firefighter's last line of defense.

CHRIS WALKER, FIRE INFORMATION OFFICER: That's the objective, is that we should not have to deploy.

BECKER: Every firefighter on the lines carries a shelter.

WALKER: Take this off. Then you scrape an area as fast as you can.

BECKER: This mylar tent is a proven lifesaving shield that takes less than a minute to deploy.

WALKER: Anger the corners, and then drop.

BECKER (on camera): Firefighters use this emergency shield to protect them more from the heat than from the flames. You can see as we peel it back here Chris has his face as close to the ground as possible, breathing the coolest air possible. There's even oxygen coming from the ground.

(voice-over): It's unclear how long these firefighters spent under their shelters, why other less drastic escape plans failed, or even the crew's level of experience fighting wildfires -- key questions looming for investigators.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PHILLIPS: That report from John Becker from CNN affiliate KGW.

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