By Anne Gleason
Portland Press Herald
Copyright 2007 Blethen Maine Newspapers, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
PORTLAND, Maine — Luke Starkey quickly swung into action upon spotting a distant white cloud last week while manning the Mount Agamenticus fire tower in western York County.
Starkey called state police in Gray. In no time, radio transmissions shattered the quiet of his tiny post atop the tower as dispatchers and firefighters prepared to respond to the fire in a remote area of Lebanon. The blaze would destroy an acre of woods.
“Oh man, that’s taking off,” said York Fire Chief Chris Balentine as he watched the smoke through binoculars. “The spring can be kind of an explosive time.”
For the past 15 years, volunteer watchers like Starkey have climbed the state’s three remaining active fire towers, all in York County, to look for brush fires.
Although the spring fire season will be winding down over the next few weeks, the lookout towers stay open until the fall and the volunteers on Mount Agamenticus, Mount Hope and Ossipee Hill stay on call until the fire danger fully subsides.
On the day of the Lebanon fire, the neighboring tower’s watchmen could not see the smoke, so Starkey estimated its location using the only landmark nearby, Abbott Hill in North Berwick. After some searching, firefighters were able to find the fire just over the border in Lebanon. They later determined it started in a stolen pickup truck that had been left in the remote area.
Ideally, volunteers in the towers work together to pinpoint a fire’s location with an alidade - an instrument used for measuring direction - and a map, a protractor and strings, Balentine said. The volunteers measure the degree of the fire’s location on the alidade, then use a protractor to draw a string across the map. If two or three volunteers take bearings, the strings’ point of intersection should be the location of the fire.
Volunteers in the towers have to know the regions they cover, said Rusty Smith, a retired firefighter who for the past five years has worked in the Mount Hope tower. When looking out across miles of treetops, watchmen use landmarks to help provide a sense of distance and depth. Smith also has developed a discerning sense of smoke color - white, bluish-gray or black may be problematic; brown is dust.
“It all starts with the eyes,” said Smith, who for 29 years was a full-time firefighter in Danvers, Mass.
In an ideal situation, the towers would be manned on any class-3 day or higher, Smith said. The fire threat is rated on a scale of 1 to 5. Windy conditions and warmer temperatures caused a couple of class-4 days earlier this month. Tuesday was a class-5 day for all areas of the state except Down East. It was the first class-5 day of the year.
Before the leaves and grass “green up” for spring, the crunchy and dry post-winter conditions provide prime fire fodder.
“It’s just waiting for the cigarette, the match, the kids drinking beer sitting around a campfire,” Smith said.
The spring fire season typically ends in May, said Kent Nelson, fire prevention specialist with the Maine Forest Service. The fire threat surfaces again in July and August, which can bring about difficult-to-fight fires that get deeper into the ground, Nelson said.
In 1991, the state stopped using its towers. It now uses smoke detection fly-over planes to spot forest fires. The Maine Forest Service contracts for one fly-over plane in each of its districts. The planes also monitor for prohibited burning.
When the state decided to switch to the fly-over planes, a group of volunteers, mostly firefighters in York County, decided to take over the lookout towers.
“There were still enough people who remembered the 1947 fire,” said Anna Woodward, who for 27 years manned the Mount Hope tower as a state employee. “That kind of kept the firefighters and the fire department in their towers. They didn’t want another mess.”
The October 1947 forest fires in Oxford and York counties and in the Bar Harbor area destroyed 220,000 acres and caused 16 deaths.
Woodward was once in the tower to see a 150-acre forest fire develop in Kennebunk and Biddeford, caused by a train throwing off sparks.
Balentine said the number of people living in York County is reason enough to keep the towers manned. York County has more fire starts than any other area, he said.
“The planes are good. The planes with the towers are even better,” he said. “Where there’s people, there will be fires.”
As of Wednesday, the state had documented about 140 fires responsible for burning 175 acres. The leading cause of forest fires, Nelson said, is burning debris.
To keep the towers active, Balentine said it’s essential to keep volunteers interested in learning the fire-lookout trade.
“It kind of gets in your blood. They get up there and they like it, so they stay up there,” he said. “If we didn’t have the volunteers, it wouldn’t work.”