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Crews continue to fight Grassy Ridge Fire

Crews are still working to put out the grassy ridge fire. The fire lead the town of Dubois to be evacuated last night. That evacuation has since been lifted but the fire still isn’t out.

The lightning-caused fire spread through the area rapidly.

“It was different because we are sitting in a sea of sagebrush, it used to be, it’s now burned through there. But that continuous fuel, that vegetation, is the reason it was able to move so quickly,” says Kelsey Grifee, with the Bureau of Land Management.

And the weather didn’t make it any better.

“Weather is always a challenge to us in fighting fire and in eastern Idaho, we tend to have pretty intense winds and that’s what propels these fires so well,” says Griffee.

Leading to extreme fire behavior, it began spotting and jumped the road.”Wind from the thunder cell build up to northeast pushed it and started growing rapidly and they couldn’t get resources in there in time to take care of it so their plan was to start doing a little town prep, to prep Dubois, to burn off at Dubois to secure some black line around there so if the head of the fire did hit that direction it wouldn’t get into any structures,” says Ken Wright, Division Supervisor.

Crews working into the night and day to get this fire contained.

“I got a couple dozers working here with a heavy equipment boss. They scratched a line around it last night, put some engines on it to wet it down, kind of checked it up until we get a really good line,” says Wright.

Thankfully no one has been injured and no structures threatened.

Ranchers are being allowed through to move cattle out of the area.

Last night they did consider doing a burn out to burn some of the vegetation out to stop the fire. They say they saw a weather change and luckily the fire laid down and they didn’t have to do that.

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