(Photo Credit: Ravell Call, KSL)
DUCHESNE — Fire crews battling the state’s largest fire have a good reason to be optimistic about their efforts for the next few days. But team leaders say if they want to make good progress against the Dollar Ridge Fire, they can’t waste any time.
Crews working on the Dollar Ridge Fire are piecing together a lot of information that can help them predict where the flames will go. That includes things like topography and wind speed. Incident Management Team Spokesman Brian Harris says, lately, their charts are showing more green and less red.
“That means things are getting better for us for fighting this fire and holding it where it is,” Harris says
He says they’re seeing promising news about the upper atmosphere activity, which has the potential to create a lot of cloud cover. That can go a long way in cooling down the fuels the fire would burn.
“Getting that cloud cover is actually a very good thing,” he adds.
Crews don’t have a long time to take advantage of these favorable conditions.
Harris says, “We’ve got a window of three or four days to make some really good progress.”
After that, the potential for clouds goes away, and officials are predicting conditions would actually start working against them.
“When that jet stream gets pushed back up into Idaho, and we’ve got sun beating down on those fuels again, we’re going to see more volatile fire behavior,” Harris says.