STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

A sweet scent comparable to that of Beechnut chewing tobacco wafted through the air as Mitch Silvester, an engine captain for the Bureau of Land Management, watched an excavator pick up a slurry of wet mulch and throw it to the ground.

“This pile was 40 feet high when we started,” he said, as two firefighters hosed down smoldering mulch with a mix of water and foam. “Now it’s almost to ground level.”

Indeed, fire and water has completely changed the landscape at Winn Compost, following a fire that broke out last week across from the Ohio Gulch Transfer Station.

James Farrell, captain of Engine E2303, was among the first on the scene after the fire was reported at 3:26 p.m. Wednesday, June 27.

Firefighters thought they were going to find a small patch of mulch on fire, he said. But as they turned the corner on Ohio Gulch Road they saw flames shooting 30 and 40 feet high from small hills of mulch spread across nearly four acres at Winn’s Compost.

Ugly white smoke tinged in black smoke belched from the scene, the acrid smell rising above the hill and settling in residential areas like Indian Creek.

“The whole place was on fire,” said Farrell. We were thinking: How did all this catch on fire like this?!”

“It was kind of surreal because we thought a portion would be on fire—and this was such a significant amount,” added Silvester. “I fought a tiny version of this that involved wood chips from a fuel reduction project in Utah last year. And all I could think was, ‘Oh man, I saw how much work that pile was and this is so much bigger.’ ”

On Monday, nearly a week after the fire started, firefighters felt that they were getting the upper hand, even though the mulch still contains “significant heat.”

They’ve managed to squelch the smoke that forced nearby residents to close their windows at night. And they’ve been able to cut down the number of workers and equipment on the scene by nearly half.

But, because of the nature of this fire, they’ve had to attack it differently and more meticulously than a forest or rangeland fire, which typically can be suppressed more quickly because of less fuel.

“We’ve never run into anything like this so we’re trying to figure out what to do as we go along,” said Ryan Berlin, public information officer for the BLM. “Imagine: 30-foot tall piles of compost—all on fire.”

Firefighters started by hosing down the tops of the piles with heavy streams of water mixed with foam, a soapy like substance that blankets the mulch and allows the water to soak in, rather than being repelled.

“You’ve seen a mosquito sit on water. If you added a drop of the foam to it, it would fall in,” said Farrell.

Excavators have climbed up on the piles, stirring the wet dirt into a slurry, then moving it to the side so it can repeat the process with smoldering dirt that was lying underneath the first.

Bulldozers have helped by spreading the mulch around so firefighters can make sure every ember is out. The final test: Putting the back of their hand on the mulch to see if it’s cool to the touch.

“The fire is deep into the compost so we’re having to bring it to the surface,” said Berlin. “We can’t get rid of the fuel so we’re trying to get rid of the heat by cooling it off with the water. If we fail to catch a spot, it could reignite the whole thing and we’d be back to square one.”

The turning of the soil helps aerate it, thereby cooling it, said Hailey Fire Chief Craig Aberbach. Firefighters even have fans to help them with that.

Firefighters used a thermal imaging device Sunday night to detect hot spots. They plan to fly a drone loaned to them by Blaine County Disaster Services Coordinator Chris Corwin Monday evening to get infrared shots showing problem spots.

“The imaging detected a hot spot here last night. That’s why we’re doing so much work here today,” said Berlin, as he stood on the south end of the fire where the fire is believed to have started. “You can see the darker parts where it was burning hot.

He paused, looking back at three-foot-tall native grasses covering a steep hillside to the south, along with sagebrush,  Mariposa lilies, purple penstemon and bitterroot wildflowers.

“We’re lucky this grass is still so green. Had this happened in late July or August when the mountainsides were so much drier, we could have had a much bigger fire on our hands,” he said. “The relatively windless days and cooler temperatures of the past few days have certainly helped. And it helped that we weren’t spread thin fighting a bunch of other fires when this broke out.”

Firefighters have used at least 300,000 gallons of water on the fire so far, ferrying it from water collection pools set up two miles away at Highway 75. Firefighters there have been pumping the water out of the creek that meanders through Valley Club.

Farrell’s truck has put 200,000 of those gallons on the fire.

His truck is an Oshkosh Army Truck, originally designed to transport troops and supplies to war zones.

The 57,000-pound armor-plated truck sports 3.5-foot tall, 540-pound tires that offer two feet of clearance and traction to carry the truck straight up a steep hill over rough terrain. It carries enough  supplies for three days. Its tank holds 2,000 gallons of water, with the capacity to spray 500 gallons of water per minute.

Climbing up four steps mounted by the passenger’s doors, the truck offered a bird’s eye view of the piles of mulch being systematically hosed and sifted through.

Farrell took a monitor sitting on the front seat in one hand. Then he flipped a switch on a control panel above the dashboard, turning on the water.

“This monitor is for fighting a range fire,” he said. “We can drive along the perimeter of a fire and turn the hose on it, spraying the fire as we’re driving.”

The monitor is easier to operate than a TV remote. A slight push of the button to the left turned the hose so it sprayed a large volume of water to the side of the truck. A slight push to the right, and it reversed itself.

Machines like this and the excavators that the BLM has bought in have allowed firefighters to get the Ohio Gulch Fire under control in days, rather than weeks.

Silvester recounted trying to dig a two-foot patch with his shovel before giving up and calling the excavator to bring its bucket in.

“It would have taken a thousand people working this by hand to do what we’ve been able to do with the machines,” he said. “We’re progressing faster than we expected.”

A cause has not been determined, but firefighters think the fire was started by spontaneous combustion as temperatures Wednesday afternoon climbed into the mid-80s. Hay can spontaneously combust when wet hay in the middle of a stack ferments and the microbial organisms heat up.

Berlin said the local firefighters who responded to the fire from Hailey, Wood River, Ketchum, Sun Valley, Bellevue, Carey and West Magic have been easy for BLM firefighters from Twin Falls, Shoshone, Boise and Bellevue to work with.

“We do drills together so it makes it more seamless when we are called to put out a fire together,”
 he added.