Zane Thompson, a Park City Fire District captain, was one of the first firefighters to respond to what would become known as the Parleys Canyon Fire, a blaze that forced the evacuation of thousands of residents and threatened hundreds of homes.
When his engine pulled to the side of Interstate 80 early Saturday afternoon, he said there was no thought of containing what had become two quickly burning brush fires fanned by heavy winds.
“We were the second engine on scene,” he said. “When we arrived the fire was just — it was cranking. It was ripping. It was probably about 25-50 acres at that point, running uphill.”
The wind was “howling,” he recalled, pushing one V-shaped fire toward Summit Park and another toward Lambs Canyon.
The fires would combine to form the 541-acre Parleys Canyon Fire, which ran up to, but did not crest, a key ridgeline separating it from hundreds of homes in Summit Park.
After three days of unseasonably cold temperatures and heavy rain, the fire was nearly extinguished Friday, according to Mike Eriksson, area manager with Utah Forestry, Fire and State Lands.
“Mother Nature couldn’t help us out any more if we asked, I don’t think,” Eriksson said. “… If it’s not already completely out, it’ll go out before it snows.”
The fire remained at 80% containment and Eriksson said crews had not been able to access it for the previous few days because of wet, muddy conditions.
“If you don’t have to get on a fire for two days, that’s usually a real good sign,” he said.
He added that overnight temperatures were in the 30s near the fire site.
“It’s looking incredibly good,” he said. “If I was a landowner I’d feel completely confident.”
Eriksson’s comments marked a dramatic reversal from the situation in the early hours of the fire as Thompson watched it race up the hillside toward Summit Park.
One of the first assignments for Thompson’s crew was to protect power lines near the initial point of ignition that were hanging over mostly oak brush vegetation, plants whose oils create deep black smoke and hot, quickly moving fire.
The utility lines powered homes but also, potentially crucially, the pumps of two water storage tanks in Summit Park that would be needed to replenish the water stores if firefighters had to put out flames in the neighborhood.
After a little more than an hour, Thompson and his crew were reassigned to Summit Park itself, which would be his vantage point for the first few days of the fire. He said the second day, particularly, was nerve-wracking.
Thompson has been fighting wildland fires since 1999, he said, and frequently deploys to help in other states.
He said that if the Parleys Canyon Fire acted on Sunday the way it did on Saturday, it could have climbed the ridgeline and sent embers into Summit Park, potentially torching the neighborhood.
“If that fire would’ve gotten established on that west side then started spotting into Summit Park, it had the potential to create a whole lot more problems at that point,” he said.
He described how the fire had done a similar thing the previous day in an adjacent location.
“We knew that the mountain it ran up on Day 1, on Saturday, it ran up to the top of that then it had spotted down at the bottom of it in the draw and burned back up to the top of the hill it came over,” he said. “The whole mountainside burned on both sides. That’s how Day 1 ended.”
He said there were multiple engines and a strike team with “eyes on” the Summit Park side of the ridgeline all day Sunday and Monday to watch for spot fires.
“Everything was lining up to be bad,” he said.
Summit County officials have said that spot fires burned as close as 150 yards from a Summit Park home.
Thompson credited two factors for preventing a catastrophic outcome for Summit Park: the smoke that blew in from fires burning in California and Oregon and the consistent and impressive support from aircraft. He also thanked local residents for evacuating and allowing fire crews to do their jobs.
The copious smoke lessened temperatures, fire officials have said. Thompson said it created a stable airmass, indicating it suppressed winds and didn’t allow the fire to get additional energy.
Fire activity was relatively low on Sunday, officials said.
“Things went a lot better than expected,” a fire spokesperson said Sunday evening, adding, “Firefighters feel like they’re starting to make progress on the fire.”
Thompson indicated aerial support was crucial. Large fixed-wing airplanes dropped retardant, and helicopters and other smaller fixed-wing planes dropped water on the blaze.
He said the target was clear Sunday morning: drop as much retardant as possible in the canyon below the ridge separating Summit Park from the fire.
“If we could just start on it with retardant, and they did that, were able to get multiple drops all morning long, multiple retardant drops into that canyon on the fire’s edge to hold it,” he said. “… We were hoping all morning long. Probably four of them, I think, just doing loops of drops: go refill, come back and drop. Basically created a retardant lake just by how many drops they did back there to hold that line place.”
Thompson said the smoke had the additional consequence of making flying in the Salt Lake Valley unsafe, grounding around 2 p.m. the larger aircraft that were refilling with fire retardant at Hill Air Force Base. That’s just before what he called the “burn hours” of 3-5 p.m.
“We were hoping whatever those tankers did could hold it through the afternoon,” he said. “If it could hold it with the assistance of (helicopter water) bucket drops, we’d be in a good spot.”
The line did hold, and then, in the middle of a historic drought, the rains came.
As of Friday, only one crew, two engines and one helicopter were dedicated to the blaze, down from a high of 278 personnel earlier in the week. Most of the firefighters decamped Thursday to Oregon, Eriksson said, dispatched to another blaze.