STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK
PHOTOS BY DIANE PEAVEY
The Great Basin Incident Management Team Type 1 will hold a Community Meeting at 6:30 tonight—Thursday, Aug. 9—in the Queen of the Hills room of the Community Campus in Hailey.
The meeting could be the last for the Sharps Fire as firefighters continue to contain the perimeter of the fire.
The fire has burned 64,646 acres—or 101 square miles—of country between Little Wood Reservoir and East Fork Road east of Hailey and Bellevue. That’s about the size of Reno, Nev.
It is 68 percent contained.
The number of firefighters working the fire has been scaled back from more than 500 to 489.
Fire crews completed a burnout operation in the Little Wood Area and continued to build a line along the northern perimeter of the fire on Wednesday. They hope to have the fire fully contained by midnight Sunday, Aug. 12.
That doesn’t mean the fire won’t be totally out…there’ll still be some smoldering and maybe even flames in the interior. But it means that firefighters are confident they’ve stopped the spread of the fire.
Today hand crews will construct direct hand lines from the northeast and northwest converging in the Little Wood drainage much as the railroads met to drive the Golden Spike into the ground. They will use heavy equipment when possible.