Tartar fire aftermath
The Tartar Fire burned more than 158 thousand acres in Washington County near the town of Weiser, Idaho. Ranchers Tristan Winegar and Cody Chandler describe their experience with the fire, from fighting the flames to the response of the local community.
(Tristan Winegar) On Saturday, August 1st, the sale was going on, our county fair was having their sale, and I received a phone call at 2 p.m. that the Tartar fire had broken out of the fire line and was headed south. And there was going to be a wind event and they were estimating 30 to 50 mile an hour winds. The ranchers were up there with bulldozers and they were making a fire line and they were going to try and back burn and stop the fire.
(Colby Chandler) We were up at our county fair, the Washington County Fair, buying animals for our county Farm Bureau, supporting the kids, and Tristan Winegar, one of our neighbors to the west, called and said that the fire that we'd known was started out on some BLM ground, that they weren't getting around it. And he felt like if we got enough of our neighbors, so we had enough manpower, we could get it stopped. And so he asked us if we could come out.
(Tristan Winegar) About 30 minutes before the fire was going to get to us and we could start back burning, the wind turned on like a light switch. Just immediately we had 20 and 30 mile an hour winds and at that point all you can do is get out of the way. By then we knew we had lost it. The fire was going like crazy. The fire burned 20 miles in just under 2 hours and it essentially burned straight south-southeast right through the middle of where we keep our cattle.
