One blaze began shortly after 11:30 a.m. Aug. 18 five miles up I-80 from Echo Junction.
While the North Summit Fire District responded, a second one sparked three miles down the road. Battalion Chief Tyler Rowser said high winds ahead of the afternoon storm made fighting the two fires more difficult.
“One of the problems with these is road debris,” he added. “Tire shreds and that all out there in that brush also caught on fire.”
But when the rain rolled in, it was a big help. Rowser said it took about two hours to control the fires.
The causes are under investigation, but Rowser said early signs point to human causes: one a result of interstate traffic and the other caused by a train.
North Summit brought in additional resources, including Utah Forestry Fire and State Lands and Park City Fire District.
Also responding was Uinta County Fire and Ambulance from Wyoming, which recently renewed its mutual aid agreement with North Summit.
The new contract adopted at the July 31 Summit County Council meeting ensures Uinta County, Wyo., is compensated when its firefighters respond across the state line, and vice versa.
North Summit Fire Chief Ben Nielsen said many calls automatically go to Uinta County dispatch if they are north on I-80 or Mirror Lake Highway.
The two blazes up I-80 come days after Summit County’s fire danger fell two notches from “extreme” to “high.” As Park City Fire Marshal Mike Owens explains, that doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods yet.
“We're starting to get really close to hitting the dew point every night. That's really where we wipe our heads and say we've had a good year,” he said on “Local News Hour.” “That's not to say that we can't have anything.”
Fires that spark now, Owens said, are just less likely to spread as quickly as before.
