![]() The Happy Jack Hotshots were assigned to the lower part of the ridge, the Mormon Lake Hotshots the top. Recovering the pilot’s body and putting out the second fire distracted key fire supervisors on site, a factor cited in the official report on the next day’s burnover.Ĭrews working overnight made good progress in containing the original fire, so on the morning of July 17 fire crews were tasked with improving the fire line. That day a B-26 dropping retardant on the Battlement Creek Fire crashed on a nearby slope, killing the pilot and starting a second fire. They also started various backfires inside the fire lines to widen the lines and prevent breakouts. Crews began building a line to surround the fire, using bulldozers where practical, hand tools where not. ![]() By July 16, the fire had grown to more than 500 acres, contained to one side of a steep drainage. The test wells were sealed and what gas and other material that had been collected, explosive and radioactive, was stored in two above-ground tanks, all of which now sat in the path of the Battlement Creek Fire.Įven though officials in Western states were tracking 198 different fires, the Battlement Creek Fire was assigned 13 crews totaling 270 firefighters and about 20 supervisors. The nuclear blast succeeded - gas was released into the cavity and fissures produced by the explosion - but the gas was too radioactive to use. In 1969, the experimental Project Rulison involved detonating a 43-kiloton nuclear bomb 8,426-feet deep in the bedrock to try to release trapped natural gas. Local crews handled the initial fire, but on July 15 it escaped containment and quickly spread in the direction of natural gas lines and wells and, more troubling, several tanks containing explosive gases and low-level radioactive waste. “Fast-running mule deer have been found dead in oak brush burns - unable to outrun the fire’s spread.” “(Dry oak brush) rate of fire spread has been observed and timed to be an incredible 16 acres per minute …,” read a report written by a forest researcher in response to the Battlement Creek tragedy. The entire ridge was a tinderbox, baked in the sun and covered in Gambel’s oak shrub bearing dead, dry leaves killed the previous month in a rare June frost. The mesa rises to 8,400 feet, and the slope near the top of the ridge line reaches 75 percent. ![]() The Battlement Creek Fire started July 11, 1976, with a lightning strike on Morrisania Mesa, a 6,047-foot mountain near Grand Valley (now Parachute), Colo. ![]()
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