By Alex Demarban
Anchorage Daily News
Copyright 2007 Anchorage Daily News
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Rick Northey and Jim Matti doused their homes with garden hoses and lawn sprinklers for hours Thursday and Friday as 150-foot-high flames from the Caribou Hills fire roared to the edge of their lawns.
“It sounded like a jet motor, if you’re sitting on a flight leaving an airport,” said Rick Northey, speaking from his house by cell phone.
The fire came within 20 feet of his home, but a lawn and greenbelt around it helped keep the fire at bay.
“Very eerie and very scary,” he said.
Northey, 54, and Matti, 60, are the only full-time residents of Lobo Lane, a mile-long dirt road dotted with a dozen or so get-away cabins off the end of Oil Well Road. Both are former firefighters, and Northey worked the 1996 Millers Reach fire.
The two have lived in the area for about 10 years and helped others build cabins, Northey said. With the Caribou Hills covered with dead trees killed by the spruce bark beetle, they’ve spent years preparing for a massive fire, including clearing trees, brush and grass to create fire breaks around their homes.
They decided to stay put, though the fire spread quickly. By early Friday morning, it had marched up hills and valleys toward his house.
“It was moving really fast. It was a fight all night long.”
Northey, retired after 25 years from Central Emergency Services in Soldotna, wore his old fire gear and helmet as the flames raced toward his home, dropping embers and ash on it. He’d built his home from surrounding trees, and cleared a “green belt” as wide as 20 to 80 feet around it.
He spent time spraying the house, adjusting sprinklers, and getting calls on his cell phone from his wife, who had gone to a fire briefing in Ninilchik and couldn’t return because emergency officials had blocked roads.
It was hot as standing near a campfire at times, and he’d have to move to a different area to get cool, he said. Matti, a former volunteer firefighter with CES, had a sprinkler on his roof. A generator pumped water from wells they’d drilled.
By Friday afternoon, the fire was burning on all three sides, until a shed where a neighbor stored gas blew up and the fire encircled his lawn on all sides, Northey said. That’s when the first aircraft arrived and stamped out the fire by dropping fire retardant.
“They came in the nick of time,” he said.
Neighbors credit the two men for saving several other homes. They clear trees and brush from portions of Lobo Lane every year, trying to create a bigger fire break between homes.
Before the flames arrived, Northey bulldozed fire breaks of soil around nearby cabins and sheds, he said. At least five cabins burned, he said. But about nine others were saved.
“They are definitely going to heaven,” said Elaina Spraker of Soldotna, who with her husband, Ted, owns one of the spared structures.