Ten years later: Spotted Tail fire remembered

A passing lightning storm the evening before raised additional worries in an area left bone-dry by six years of drought. Local, state and federal fire fighters were monitoring the situation with concern.

The concerns proved valid that afternoon and evening, as a lightning-caused wildfire south of Chadron advanced some eight miles in a matter of hours, crested the top of C-Hill on the Chadron State College campus with a massive firestorm that turned pine trees into instant matchsticks and threatened the entire town before being stopped a few hundred yards short of the nearest college buildings.

Ten years later, a stone marker beside a trail on C-Hill marks the line where hundreds of firefighters, local residents and college workers managed to hold the fire at bay, and some of the people involved in the massive effort to protect the town and the campus have shared their memories of the event.

“I thought it was going to go east of here,” long-time CSC information director Con Marshall said of the fire that had created a towering plume of smoke by late-afternoon that Friday and was obviously threatening the southern edge of town and CSC’s tree-studded campus.

“I was down in the basement (of the since-demolished Kline building) and still sending pictures when the lights went out. I was on phone…and told the (reporter) ‘Maybe I have to leave.’ He thought it was funny,” Marshall said.

That was about 7:30 p.m. and there weren’t many people laughing in Chadron. Marshall and his wife, Peggy, then a CSC education faculty member, were among the hundreds of Chadron residents who had been given evacuation orders not long before. Smoke from the oncoming fire made it difficult to see more than a few hundred yards, and the sound of sirens filled the air. Volunteer firefighters from around the area, aided by local residents on heavy equipment, were frantically cutting a fire line across C-Hill as the fire moved northwards at frightening speed.

Dale Grant, who had been promoted to vice president of Finance and Administration at CSC just two months before, had been working earlier in the day on the logistics of setting up facilities on campus for a federal Incident Command team assigned manage response to the four fires already burning in the area.

“At 10 a.m. I thought we were housing a couple of dozen Type II response team members,” Grant said.

But by 5 p.m., when the team’s command post had been established at CSC, the situation had changed dramatically.

“I walked out the south side of the admin building and there was a plume of smoke coming right up over C-Hill,” said Grant. “I wondered, ‘Where did that come from?’ Not long after that, they evacuated Hidden Valley (a subdivision on the south west corner of the CSC campus,)” Grant said.

Realizing then that fire would likely reach the campus, which was mostly vacant because of summer break, Grant called in all of the maintenance staff he could reach.

“We started stringing hose and firing up sprinkler systems on pretty much everything that was susceptible to fire from the ash,” he said. “We put people on the roof with little sprinklers or anything we could. We fired up every underground sprinkler we had on the south perimeter,” Grant said.

The towering smoke cloud had attracted attention from others as well.

“After seeing the big plume of smoke south of town, I took my camera to the top of C-Hill to get photos,” said Justin Haag, then communications coordinator for CSC. “Before long two gentlemen from security came up to get me down, which seemed premature. By the time I got down to my vehicle, I could see the flames engulfing trees at the top of the hills south of campus. I was thankful they came and got me.”

Haag said at that point the astonishing speed of the fire’s advance left him frightened.

“The fire had moved so far in such a short period of time, I didn’t think anything could stop it,” he said. “I rushed home, sprayed down the house with water and began preparing for the worst.”

By mid-afternoon, when the threat to the CSC campus was evident, crews fighting the other fires had been called to Chadron, said Grant. But the power outage at about 7:30 p.m. left the federal team managing the fire response without power, and they had to evacuate as well, he said.

About 45 minutes later the fire crested C-Hill, in a “very impressive” moment that Grant watched from “a front row seat” on the top of the Burkhiser building, while wondering what would happen if the college burned.

But Marshall, who captured an iconic photo of the fire cresting C-Hill, said the wide swath of green grass at the foot of C-Hill discounted the possibility that the fire would burn into campus and enter the town.

“It was good the football fields were down there,” Marshall said.

Chuck Butterfield, then a CSC rangeland faculty member, watched the fire crest C-Hill with a Chadron Volunteer Fire Department crew stationed at a vantage point near the southeast corner of campus. A veteran wildland fire instructor, Butterfield said he too didn’t think the fire would reach into Chadron.

“I didn’t have much worry about it making it into town,” he said. “It had to burn through campus and they did a good job flooding the roofs,” Butterfield said.

That insight proved correct and the fire’s rapid spread was finally halted at the hastily constructed fire line at the base of C-Hill. Grant said he’s not certain, but thinks a slight wind shift may have helped firefighters’ efforts

“It was hard to know. (Fires) kind of create their own wind,” he said. “I heard afterward that the plume kind of collapsed.”

Butterfield said he thinks the powerful wind pushing the blaze probably created a lifting effect as it came over the ridge, which helped keep ash and burning embers from igniting spot fires in the town itself.

“The streets created a canyon effect. When it crested, it lifted a lot of that (ash) up and away,” he said.

Whatever the cause, by 10:30 p.m. power was restored to campus, the Incident Command team was back in operation and the crisis had largely passed. Grant said at about 11 p.m. he went back to the Admin building, where hallways were filled with smoke and alarms were going off everywhere.

“I couldn’t tell if it was on fire,” he said. “I walked the whole thing to see if there was anything going on. There wasn’t.”

After spending the night sleeping on a church pew at the evacuation center, Marshall said he got up early and went up to the Hidden Valley subdivision, where three homes had burned. One resident who had ignored evacuation orders and stayed to protect his home, was still at work, and “looked like warmed over death, with charcoal all over his face,” said Marshall, who later that day sent out a press release announcing that CSC had been saved from the fire.

With the campus and town considered safe, Grant said his attention turned to taking care of the 550 federal firefighters and an additional 140 Job Corps students who had been forced to evacuate their facility near the south end of the fire. That posed another challenge, as the college food service contractor didn’t have many supplies on hand because classes weren’t in session, he said.

“They went and got everything they could off the shelves at all the grocery stores and the second day a semi-load of food showed up,” Grant said.

The area fires, known collectively as the Dawes/Sioux complex, burned more than 68,000 acres but caused no major injuries before being completely contained on August 5. By that time, activity at CSC had resumed its normal course, although a 400-ton pile of wood chips, intended as fuel for the college heating and cooling system, continued to smolder for days before it was completely doused.

College classes started as scheduled on Aug. 21, but the loss of the pine forest on C-Hill was a “downer” for students and community members, according to Haag. The success of the CSC football team that fall helped lift spirits, however, he said, as did the lush green grass that covered the hillside the following spring.

Although CSC had an emergency plan in place, the fire showed that even the best of plans “will last about a couple of hours and then you play it by ear,” said Grant. Thanks to the fire, he added, the plan has been rewritten, and the college now has backup generators in place to power essential functions such as phone and internet services.

Grant carries another lesson from the fire with him every day-a small card with phone numbers of college officials and local emergency services. That’s needed because heavy use quickly drains cell phone batteries, making the phone useless and its contact list inaccessible, he said. 

Overall Chadron State handled the fire emergency quite well, according to Butterfield.

“CSC handled the threat fantastically. There was a little chaos, but not bad for that quick a response.”

Haag said he was grateful for the calm temperament of Janie Park, then president of CSC, during the fire, a sentiment also expressed by Grant, who praised her for handling the political side of dealing with state officials during the height of the crisis.

The presence of hundreds of fire fighters in the area when the fire started, and the timely evacuation orders issued by local officials were among the critical elements that kept the campus and community safe, according to Grant.

“We were probably in as good a shape as we could have been,” he said. “There is no way we could have had enough local resources to do a thing. We were very fortunate.”