Fire tales: 'Man, that's going to get really big, really quick'

For Pete and Teri Jo Christianson at Badger Lake, the worst of the Watermelon Hill fire closed in late Saturday night through early Sunday morning, but in the end passed them by.

As the resident manager at Badger Lake Estates, Teri Jo was changing her lawn sprinklers around 3:30 p.m. when she noticed some ominous smoke to the west. She drove to the ranch of friends Genny and Mike McKinley at Amber Lake, much closer to the blaze. Mike McKinley was gone, called to fire duty as a volunteer with District 3. Both women agreed the nearby smoke "didn't look good" but when they turned around to look back towards Badger Lake and Turnbull, they saw more smoke.

"She goes, 'we're surrounded, there's fire by your house,'" Teri Jo Christianson said.

By this point, things for Mike McKinley and his volunteer fire crew from Spokane Fire District 3's Williams Lake station were getting interesting - and busy. McKinley said he first noticed the smoke over in Lincoln County while outside talking with his farm employee and several other friends.

"We were watching and thinking, 'man, that's going to get really big, really quick," McKinley said.

McKinley's employee called District 3 headquarters on Presley Drive in Cheney to see if they had received a call yet, which they hadn't. That changed quickly, and McKinley's crew - after heading to their station as they were calling district headquarters - was mobilized and sent to Fish Trap Lake.

The Station 312 crew sat at Fish Trap watching the thick, swirling smoke march their direction, debating which side of the lake it would go on. They eventually settled on the east side, and moved out.

"We went to (the intersection of) Scroggie and Harris (roads) and it was there," McKinley said.

The crew spent the rest of the afternoon and into the evening skirmishing with the fire that advanced at times in leaps and bounds, concentrating when they could on saving structures and trying to keep it north of Pine Springs Road as it ran along the northern edge of Amber Lake. McKinley said the strategy was to prevent flames from reaching Mullinix and Sterling roads further north, where grassland dotted with trees became more heavily wooded.

"It's a completely different kind of animal fighting a fire in trees rather than open grass," McKinley said. "It's like lighting a Roman candle when trees go."

Meanwhile, Christianson returned to Badger Lake. She didn't begin to really worry until a couple hours later when two things happened. Around 6 p.m. she heard from her daughter, Maria Fell, who said they had been told to evacuate their Lance Hill home.

Teri Jo Christianson couldn't understand the order since their house was closer to the blaze than her daughter's. Soon after that call, a Spokane County Sheriff's deputy showed up at the their home and told Pete, Teri Jo and the family they needed to prepare to evacuate.

Christianson began alerting people staying at the 100-space resort. She went online and sent Facebook posts, hoping if one person saw the post and passed it on, it would have been useful. At one point she was "multi-tasking," cell phone in one hand, landline in the other while at the same time packing the family's belongings.

Eventually she decided to be more active with the alerts. About the same time the county's reverse 911 system kicked in, calling residents in the affected areas.

"Between the reverse 911 and me driving around honking (the vehicle horn) I figured we could get everyone out," she said.

The family stayed, keeping their sprinklers running while Teri Jo's father used the family bulldozer to plow a fire line in the dark at the back of their 40-acre property. Around 11 p.m., Teri Jo said things got scary when the western glow intensified, began to flicker and included glimpses of emergency vehicle lights and sounds of sirens in the distance.

Those lights, sounds and flickering likely came from the direction of the Amber Lake area where McKinley and other District 3 personnel were conducting a frustrating defensive battle against the flames that now spanned a four-mile front. At one point the fire crossed Pines Springs Road around Harris Road and burnt a 2-3 acre patch the crews managed to extinguish, saving a home and keeping the fire away from Mullinix and Sterling.

They also saved two more homes along Pine Springs as it bent to the north, more in the direct path of the blaze. McKinley said all three houses benefited from smart owners who had created a green zone and defensible space around their dwellings.

At his place in Amber Lake, McKinley's wife Genny said she watched planes come and scoop water out of the lake to help battle the blaze. She said she also saw planes dropping fire retardant, saying it looked like they were targeting structures rather than just the land.

Around 9 a.m. though, she got the order to "bug-out." The flames forced her to take a circuitous route to some friends in Tyler through Cheney.

"It was probably about a half mile from me," Genny McKinley said of the fire when she left. "I could see the flames in trees in the distance and said, OK, time to go."

At Badger Lake, the Christianson's spent a restless night fully clothed and ready to leave. Around 5 a.m. Teri Jo's mobile phone scanner app woke her with the sounds of emergency personnel talking back and forth while they skirmished with the blaze near Sterling and Mullinix roads - the closest the fire got to Badger Lake.

In the morning, the skies were clear and sunny. Fire crews from other jurisdictions, in state and out of state, had arrived to assist local crews, giving Mike McKinley's team and other first responders welcome relief.

When he and Genny eventually returned to their home, they counted about 150 tons of hay lost to the blaze with 130 acres of winter wheat also having gone up in smoke. Miles of fencing was destroyed and will have to be replaced, but the couple's 500-plus head of cattle had all survived, more fortunate than other area farmers and ranchers.

Some, including the McKinley's, lost barns and other structures, while others lost all of their pastureland, with one rancher having to put down several cattle he found that were on fire. Mike McKinley, whose family has farmed the area for five generations, didn't originally think the fire had come that close to his home.

"Still, I'm looking at out my window (Tuesday) now and everything is black," he said.

McKinley and Teri Jo Christianson praised the work of firefighters and others who helped out. McKinley said he has received calls from people even in Cheney with offers to help rebuild fencing while Christianson is grateful the Cheney Rodeo Association, let area horse owners - like her daughter - house their animals at the rodeo grounds. She feels comforted firefighters will remain around for several days, if not weeks, to ensure the blaze is extinguished.

All the same, she's decided not to return family pictures from boxes to their original locations on the walls.

"I think I'll wait 2-3 weeks, just to be sure," she said.

John McCallum can be reached at jmac@cheneyfreepress.com.