While most fled from the Taylor Bridge wildfire earlier this month Tim Perciful and Ginger Passarelli did the opposite.
As soon as news broke Aug. 14, they headed to Cle Elum to see how they could help. Passarelli, whose Soup Ladies provide meals to support first responders during emergencies and disasters, came back after she found a Southern Baptist Disaster Relief team had filled the role.
“They are an awesome group,” she said. “I worked with them after (Hurricane) Katrina. They put out a ton of food.”
Perciful, on the other hand, found himself working as one of 19 public information officers for a Washington Incident Management Team (WIMT) for the next nine days as firefighters worked to contain one of the biggest wildfires in the Northwest.
Perciful, the spokesman for Mountain View Fire and Rescue which serves Black Diamond and Auburn, first responded on behalf of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which requested he visit an animal shelter near Ellensberg to see if any help was needed. After he drove down there, however, he found he was not needed and headed over to the chimpanzee sanctuary near Cle Elum where his wife works as a caregiver. While he was preparing to head back to Black Diamond he learned he was needed as a PIO on the third day of the fire. By the time Perciful arrived, more than 1,000 firefighters had been deployed across the region, either containing the fire or placed strategically near residential areas to protect homes. He credited local fire departments and initial responders with helping to minimize the fire until further help could arrive.
“If it weren’t for their hard work this fire would have been a lot worse,” he said. “They had a helicopter on scene in the initial hours after the fire started.”
While the fire at that point had been 20 percent to 30 percent contained, Perciful said they still faced potentially an even worse emergency if the fire spread north, near the unincorporated community of Liberty, where it could have entered mountainous terrain extremely difficult for firefighters to access with vehicles due to the limited number of roads.
“It would have been really hard for the firefighters to contain it, so there was a big push to not let it go any farther,” he said.
As information came to Perciful, sometimes quickly, sometimes in small pieces, he and the other PIOs would then distribute the information, with a high priority on the most critical, to local media outlets, as well as the residents whose homes had burned down and had no access to the Internet or a TV.
“It’s a very different scenario than in the normal basis because we have such a different audience,” he said.
Additionally, the fire attracted worldwide attention ranging from a news crew from Beijing to a documentary filmmaker from Central Washington University.
Perciful said they would receive updates from their operation section chief twice a day, one at 6 a.m. and another at 4 p.m. He said they had to be careful to ensure the information they sent out was accurate, as the situation could easily change between those times.
“Our most current information came right after that form in the evening,” he said. “We would try to make phone calls to everyone who tried to contact us, TV stations, radio stations, newspapers, and call back giving them an update telling them what was going on…We had to be very careful about what we put out. It’s a fluid situation. A lot of communication has to happen and when you’re in a situation where communication is difficult it’s not the most accurate.”
Meanwhile a provisional camp was set up at Cle Elum middle and high schools to house the firefighters. While the command staff set up in the school buildings, firefighters slept in tents that filled up both of the sports fields. Perciful, however, said he spent some of those nights sleeping in his van. In the morning and at night, prison inmates convicted of either minor crimes or on good behavior provided the firefighters with breakfast and dinner. For lunch, the firefighters received their meals from semi-trucks driven to their locations.
While the agencies fought to prevent the fire from spreading, Perciful said they encountered another an rather unusual problem — a deluge of donations from across the state. Although Perciful said it was amazing how the community responded, the massive influx of donations left them with either too many donations or donations they were unable to use.
“Someone tried to donate a lot of meat, but we couldn’t accept it because we didn’t know where it had come from,” Perciful said. “We couldn’t (risk) making the firefighters sick. (But) the community support for this fire was incredible. I’ve never seen community support like this. It was all over Washington. We had trucks full of Gatorade, water, socks. It was just amazing. So much so we had to say we can’t accept anymore. We just didn’t have anywhere to put it. We were giving it to the shelter because it was way too much for us to handle.”
Although Perciful did not go near the fire, he said that he visited areas that had already burned or spot fires.
Finally, by Aug. 21, the fire was 90 percent contained, and within two days Perciful was allowed to head back home. The fire is believed to have been started by construction work on the Taylor Bridge. The wildfire is estimated to have caused $8.3 million in damage and consumed 20,000 acres.
