Big-Sky Country Ablaze

"Our state is literally on fire," said Montana's Governor Ted Schwinden, who had only to look out the window of his office in Helena to see thick gray smoke billowing skyward last week from the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness Area, 20 miles from the state capital. Touched off by lightning strikes and whipped by winds that at tunes exceeded 50 m.p.h., flames devoured more than 220,000 acres of unusually dry timber and range lands, creating what is considered the worst conflagration in Montana since 1967. Some 5,000 fire fighters, including many from neighboring states, battled throughout the week, at a cost of $1 million a day, to bring 18 major fires under control. Supporting the fire fighters were 21 helicopters and 42 air tankers that sprayed water and fire-retardant chemicals from above. Despite the efforts, Schwinden observed, "you don't fight a fire like this. You simply get people out of the way and wait for the winds to die down." Late in the week the winds eased, and an inch of rain fell on the western portion of the state, allowing shallow trenches dug by fire fighters to halt the spread often of the fires.

Hardest hit was an area near the town of Roundup (pop. 2,119) in southeastern Montana, where 37 homes were destroyed by a blaze that began in the arid Bull Mountains, sending up columns of smoke that drifted into Billings, 30 miles to the south. "It sounded like a jet engine coming through," said Dana Lynam, 34, after a wall of flames attacked her house and melted nearby mobile homes and autos in minutes. Lynam and some 500 others throughout the state were evacuated in time to escape the flames.

At night the mountain blazes cast an eerie red glow in the sky to the north of Helena, reminding residents of one of the region's worst forest fires, the Mann Gulch fire of 1949, which cost the lives of 13 fire fighters. "It looks like someone dropped the Bomb somewhere," said one resident. There were no precise estimates of the value of destroyed property and timber, but the damage totaled millions of dollars. Near Libby, in the northwest corner of the state, 16 barns and other farm buildings were consumed by a blaze along Houghton Creek in the Kootenai National Forest. Miraculously, though, by week's end there were no reports of lives lost to the statewide inferno.