By Andrew Wellner
Anchorage Daily News (Alaska)
Copyright 2006 Anchorage Daily News
All Rights Reserved
BIG LAKE, Alaska — A multithemed gathering drew more than 100 people Thursday evening to the Big Lake Library as the community memorialized the Big Lake fire, which charred the local landscape 10 years ago.
Attendees celebrated the Big Lake Fire Department’s 25th anniversary, watched as Horseshoe Lake became the first certified “fire wise community” in the state and helped kick off the library’s summer reading program. But it was the fire that was on most people’s minds.
“It’s time to remember, it’s time to celebrate that in the last 10 years our community has grown and prospered,” said Cindy Bettine, a member of the Matanuska-Susitna Borough Assembly.
Like many on hand that day, she had stories to share about the fire, which began off Miller’s Reach Road near Houston and destroyed more than 400 structures while burning about 37,000 acres.
“My son and I left the fire when the hot pine needles started falling in our driveway,” she said.
Bettine didn’t lose her home, but state Rep. Mark Neuman, a Republican who represents Wasilla, was not so lucky. He said he’s still immensely grateful for the community support he received as he rebuilt.
“It was a community effort,” he said. “We’d go out to the end of our driveway and we’d find building supplies or packages of food or toys for my kids.”
Big Lake Fire Chief Bill Gamble said that when the fire took off, “we were in the middle of a firestorm that the state of Alaska had never seen before.”
He said his department and the others in the borough are now much better prepared to fight wildfires. They can’t keep a similar fire from starting, he said, but will be much more able to fight one if it does.
Iditarod musher Martin Buser pulled a few laughs from the crowd as he recounted the infamous story of how he and a friend “liberated” a Big Lake water tanker by driving it through the garage door of a fire station.
Unlike in the movies, “it took actually a few tries to get it out,” he said.
It was a story he thinks he will never live down, but that people who lived through the fire seem to sympathize with, in his reckoning, better than those further removed.
Buser had stayed behind to defend his home and had high praise for those who did likewise.
“To this day, you know, it’s ironic, I have not met a single person who stayed behind to fight the fire and lost,” he told the crowd.
After the speakers were done, Mat-Su area forester Ken Bulman presented a glass plaque and road sign emblazoned with the fire wise communities logo to Cathi Kramer, head of the group which recently worked to get Horseshoe Lake certified as the first fire wise community in Alaska.
Fire wise communities have to work to reduce fire fuels and other hazards in the area and are in turn certified through the national program.
“They did a lot of hard work,” Bulman said. Being the first in the state, he said, “is to be commended because it’s a big state.”