We’re writing about two related topics: Fires in Anchorage and quick remediation, and homeless person displacement.Fires: We live on the Hillside, just 600 feet north of the home that burned down on Zircon Circle. We packed up our cars to evacuate as soon as we learned of the fire, as nothing but dry spruce forest — some of it dead — lies between our home and the one on Zircon. Then we could watch the progress of the firefighting from our back deck, and did, for several harrowing hours. It took most of that time for the helicopter to arrive with its bucket to finally put out the fire.
Though the fire department had numerous units on site, they were apparently unable to stop the blaze and keep it from moving into surrounding vegetation — which exploded and shot fiery embers up into the air (which were blown and fell miles away in the stiff winds). We were most disappointed and frightened to see how long it took for the bucket helicopter to arrive. Only with the bucket deployment did the fire even begin to be under control.
Later, we learned that there is apparently no helicopter bucket capability in Anchorage. The helicopter had to fly all the way from Mat-Su.This is nuts! There is way too much tax base at risk in forested areas of Anchorage for there to be a three-hour wait for effective emergency operations to begin. It may be expensive to create a home base for helicopter bucket service in Anchorage, but “penny-wise” may be a poor and ultimately very expensive way to operate. We implore the mayor and the Assembly to rectify this crucial public safety and tax base protection lapse.
Homeless people: We recently had another wildfire devastating our parklands and polluting our air with respiratory illness-causing smoke, due both, I imagine, in part to the lack of quick response from effective firefighting equipment and the current decrease in adequate homeless “housing.” As long as we keep pushing our homeless population out of good shelters into the woods, we will face more fires in those woods.
Thus, we urge the mayor and the Assembly to reassess and delay the planned closure of the Sullivan Arena shelter until we have in place adequate shelter for as many homeless persons as have been identified in the area.
— Cindy and Wray Kinard
Anchorage
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