Yellowstone Fire Stirs Demands for Investigation

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. —  Authorities closed all but a sliver of Yellowstone Thursday as winds fanned blazes that have defeated thousands of firefighters and engulfed the country’s largest national park in both flames and controversy.

President Reagan ordered two Cabinet members to visit Yellowstone and other fire-plagued areas of the West, and angry residents of communities flanking the sprawling park demanded an inquiry into the National Park Service’s management of the summer firestorms.

Old Faithful geyser continued to spout every 50 to 80 minutes Thursday, but 200 yards behind it flames were shooting into the acrid sky. The blackened forests around the geyser made it look as if someone had singed the corners of everyone’s favorite picture postcard.

Smoke Drifts to Chicago

Smoke from Yellowstone blanketed the Great Plains, drifting as far away as Chicago.

About 1 million acres in and around Yellowstone have been charred, according to park officials, and most of the 2.2-million-acre park was closed Thursday for the first time ever. Only an eight-mile section of road at the park’s north entrance near Mammoth Hot Springs remained open.

In the Old Faithful area, tanker trucks drew water from rivers, and ambulances waited in parking lots that are usually filled with the cars and camper trucks of tourists this time of year.

“To use a fire term, this fire is kicking our ass,” said Denny Bungarz, in charge of fighting the 250,000-acre North Fork fire near West Yellowstone. Bungarz, on loan from Mendocino National Forest in California, said firefighters are frustrated by the determined blaze, which set 17 small structures ablaze in the Old Faithful complex Wednesday.

“We put our lines in, mop up, patrol and, two weeks later, the wind comes and pushes it back over what we did,” he said.

About 150 residents evacuated Sunday from Silver Gate and Cooke City, small Montana towns on the edge of the park, were allowed to go home, but a spot fire closed the highway. Firefighters had used backfires Tuesday to save the towns.

Fire officials warned that a wind shift could send the 119,000-acre Storm Creek-Hellroaring fire back at the canyon towns and force another evacuation.

“Winds are expected throughout the park Friday with gusts to 50 or 60 miles an hour,” National Park Service spokeswoman Linda Miller said late Thursday night. “They’re predicting winds to the west or northwest. If it blows west we’re probably OK, but if northwest we may have some problems.”

Some residents and merchants in the tiny communities bordering Yellowstone accuse officials of waiting too long to declare war on the fires.

“There should be an environmental impact statement and Senate investigations on these fires right here--not in Washington, D.C.--and by a group other than these Ecology 101 people who run this park,” Frank Rigler, a Gardiner, Mont., rancher, charged. He was circulating petitions criticizing Yellowstone’s failure to control the 11 fires still burning within park boundaries.

‘Let Burn’ Policy

At issue is the government’s 1972 “let burn” policy, which discourages human intervention in anything but man-caused fires in wilderness areas. Environmentalists contend that letting nature take its course keeps the wilderness pristine, but critics argue that such a policy courts disaster. The North Fork fire that imperiled the Old Faithful complex Wednesday was started by a cigarette, but most of the other fires in the park were caused by lightning.

In Washington, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said the President met with Agriculture Secretary Richard E. Lyng, Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel and Deputy Defense Secretary William H. Taft IV. The three were expected to depart for the West today.

Fitzwater said the trip would probably lead to an increase in the 2,500 military troops currently on the fire lines.

More than 9,000 firefighters are on duty in Yellowstone alone, and across the West more than 25,000 firefighters are battling 30 fires in California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, Utah and Wyoming, United Press International reported. Nearly 1.5 million acres in the seven states have burned.

Old Faithful Fire ‘Over’

Bungarz declared the danger to the Old Faithful area “90% over” after the North Fork fire destroyed small buildings in the park Wednesday and forced evacuation of the favorite tourist attraction.

But fire officials said they were still extremely worried about a new weather front that could bring winds even stronger than the 50-m.p.h. gusts that whipped flames near Old Faithful Wednesday. The front promised a slight chance of snow or rain, though--welcome moisture in the drought-ravaged meadows and forests.

Impact on Wildlife Unknown

Experts say the long-term impact on Yellowstone’s wildlife cannot be determined until the fires are out, although park rangers have said the big burn of 1988 will bring the park a sorely needed period of regeneration, creating fresh habitats in areas once covered by dense, diseased lodgepole pine.

“Basically, the feeling is there will be a short-term impact on wildlife, particularly with erosion and ash in streams,” said Mark Palmer, chairman of the Sierra Club’s National Wildlife Committee.

Club Backs Fire Policy

The Sierra Club advocates the “let burn” policy, and Palmer questioned whether Yellowstone’s fires could have been contained even if they had been fought aggressively from the time they first flared last June.

“A lot of the fire is in wilderness country where there isn’t access for firefighting crews, anyway,” Palmer said in a telephone interview from San Francisco.

In Washington, Fitzwater said Reagan had asked Hodel, Lyng and Taft to look into the fire situation after Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) expressed concern when the President met with Republican congressional leaders Wednesday.

Another Wyoming legislator, Sen. Malcolm Wallop, also a Republican, met with Hodel on Wednesday and suggested that National Park Service Director William Penn Mott resign. Mott and Forest Service officials have admitted that, in hindsight, the “let burn” policy should have been abandoned from the very beginning because of the intensity of the fires and the drought. Instead, they waited until July 22 to set the policy aside.

No One Being Fired

Fitzwater said the Reagan Administration does not fault the Departments of Agriculture and Interior for letting the fires burn.

“We have no plans to fire anybody,” he said.

In Yellowstone, Jim Gabel, who operates a seed orchard for the Forest Service in Mt. Ida, Ark., found himself helping maintain fire-fighting helicopters.

“It’s truly something,” he said. “I’ve seen a couple of bad circumstances in California. But this is really the biggest and most spectacular I’ve ever seen.”

In West Yellowstone, the Park Service turned a fly-fishing school into a fire information center, where firefighters, the media and a few tourists consult maps charting the fires’ progress. At least one fire is now expected to burn through the end of October. The park’s tourist-information radio station is now devoted entirely to fire updates.

Driest Year in History

“This is the driest and greatest fire year in recorded history in the Yellowstone Park area,” Joe Halladay, chief naturalist at Old Faithful, said.

During any fire, Halladay said, burning embers, wood and twigs fly half a mile or more. Normally, only 20% of these “firebrands” start new fires, he said, but this year, dry conditions put that figure at an estimated 80%.

Ultimately, Halladay, said, “we’re going to have to wait for a break in the weather.”

In Montana’s Glacier National Park, firefighters struggled to flank the 14,000-acre Red Bench forest fire that has burned more than a dozen homes, but officials were reluctant to assign crews to the leading edge of the fire.

“In a situation like this, when you’ve got 20-m.p.h. winds and a large, very dry area of lodgepole pine, the only things that will slow it down are rain, humidity and natural barriers,” information officer Jim Payne said.

About 1,400 firefighters were on the lines of Montana’s 238,400-acre Canyon Creek fire near the Idaho border, which was mostly stalled by cool temperatures Thursday.

Fires have burned about 200,000 acres in the rugged canyons of central Idaho.

Bob Secter reported from Yellowstone National Park and Tamara Jones from Los Angeles.