PINE VALLEY, Utah — Down in Washington County, you can see exactly where the Forsyth Fire began thanks to white puffs of smoke at the very top of a mountain near Pine Valley. That's where investigators found the smoking gun, or in this case, a smoking tree that started the fire that has grown to nearly 9,000 acres.
The fire, now in its sixth day, started from a 41-foot tree struck by lightning on June 8. The heat smoldered within the tree until winds kicked up 10 days later, spreading heat and flames.
But how did the investigators pinpoint the exact location?
"It's a little geeky," laughed Ryan Riddle.
As an Iron County Fire Investigator, Riddle is somewhat of a Sherlock Holmes when it comes to wildfires.
"We can actually see GPS coordinates where that lightning strike has hit," Riddle explained. "When we're investigating a fire, we use a process of elimination. So we look at all the different causes, and we try to eliminate as many as we can. So, if we can eliminate human causes, and we know that there was lightning in the area, then we can determine that it was most likely caused by lightning."
Why should Utah communities prepare now for catastrophic wildfires:
What about those satellites that can detect the signs of a wildfire’s heat?
"There is heat detection. However, a small fire like [the Forsyth Fire], typically, there's not even any flame, it's literally just smoldering, and that does go undetected. It takes a fair amount of heat before you get into that heat detection phase, and there was unprecedented heat and wind in Pine Valley," said Riddle.
Sam Webber, an incident meteorologist working the Forsyth Fire with Great Basin Team 7, shared how violent those winds actually were.
"It was a pretty high-end Red Flag Warning event," said Webber. "We're looking at, you know, in the whole of 30 years, looking back, the winds during that time were in the top 20-to-10% of wind events in this portion of Utah."
Crews battling Forsyth Fire get some rest, but remain in race against time:
The fire has reached 5% contained as of Wednesday.
"With our southwest winds, the fire wants to push to the northeast here, and so we're just looking to put a line between the active fire edge and the community," said Jordan Nesbitt with the National Interagency Fire Center, Great Basin Team 7. "We won't call an area contained until we are sure that if the fire activity in that area would pick back up again.
Unfortunately, the weather that originally caused the fire is picking back up again.
"The big picture is we're warming back up," Webber explained, "we're drying back out, temperatures by Saturday, Sunday and even into Monday are going to be pushing 90 degrees once again here in Pine Valley."
