STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
A man whom witnesses saw lighting a handful of cottonwood seeds allegedly set fire to the Draper Preserve near the Bow Bridge following the Fourth of July parade in Hailey.
The fire ran about 200 yards, creating a lot of smoke and emptying Lion Park of several hundred people who had turned out for the Wood River Land Trust’s third annual RiverFest.
Onlookers watched as the Hailey Police took a 42-year-old Dietrich man into custody, even as fire trucks were arriving on the scene.The man was charged with third degree arson, a felony.
Summer Hanson said she was walking through the preserve with her father Tom Hanson, who had been the grand marshal in the parade, when they saw what appeared to be a man setting fire to cotton seed as another man and woman watched.
The fire blew up, she said, and raced through low lying grasses towards the Draper Preserve boardwalk.
The flames were about two feet high, said Steve Crosser, who was riding his bicycle through the preserve at the time and verified others' accounts. It covered three-quarters of an acre.
“He said, ‘Watch this.’ Then it apparently blew up in his face,” Crosser recounted.
A few men grabbed small fire extinguishers and ran towards the fire, which started just after 2 p.m. The fire quickly made a run right alongside the walking path nearest Lions Park as smoke obliterated the woods.
Firefighters from the Hailey Fire Department, Wood River Fire and Rescue and Bureau of Land Management began arriving on the scene a few minutes later, dragging hoses into the woods.
Law enforcement officials told Swagger, a popular Celtic rock band from Salt Lake City, to stop playing and ordered people to evacuate the premises.
“Now’s a good time to get a burger or burrito,” quipped one man as he watched lines evaporate at KB’s Burritos, the Wood River Sustainability Center and other food trucks set up on the premises.
“This was our best fest ever,” said Scott Boettger, executive director of the Wood River Land Trust. “And this shut it down.”
Hailey Fire Chief Craig Aberbach, who had taken part in the Old Days of the West Parade just two hours earlier, took the reins as incident commander as Wood River Fire and Rescue’s Bart Lassman arrived with water tenders.
Lassman noted that cottonwood seed is as flammable as gasoline.
“We had a festival going on here. This got into the cottonwood trees and put lives at risk,” he said. “It came real close to federal land. And it could have gone up the mountainside.”
The man is being held in the Blaine County Detention Center until his arraignment on Thursday, July 5.
"Give the current conditions, this really could have been much more serious," said Blaine County Sheriff Steve Harkins.