JIM THORPE, Pa. — Smoke and Fire. That’s been the reality of life around Jim Thorpe since Saturday afternoon when a brush fire started burning on Bear Mountain just southeast of the town, blanketing the town in an acrid haze and closing government offices for the day.
“Within an hour literally the whole side of the mountain was in flames,” said Ryan Schubeck, Bowmanstown.
Since then, 110 of firefighters and forestry officials have been working to try and box the fire in using the river, bulldozers and controlled burns to head off where it could spread, according to Larry Bickel, a spokesman for the state Bureau of Forestry’s Incident Management Team.
He ran through how they’re fighting this fire.
“Sometimes we can go direct. If the fire’s not that bad or the wind’s not that bad, we can get direct on the fire and put it out but in this instance we have to go indirect. We have to look at where our natural barriers are, where our manmade barriers were from logging operations, skidder roads something that we can use to build a box around this fire. As we work into it, that’s what we wanna do. If we have to burn off our box, we will. If we can get direct into the fire, we will too,” said Bickel.
Wildland firefighters working the fire line to try to keep this fire from spreading any further and potentially threatening a nearby neighborhood.
Some residents not far from the fire, like Bill Lance, say they have their belongings packed just in case, though there’s been no order to get out. Forestry officials say no structures are in danger, but nerves are frayed near the fire lines all the same.
“Actually, we did the thing that you do. You grab everything that you think you might need, and you put it in the car and then you take a walk around the home that you’ve been in for a long time and you either take it all or you take nothing. Taking one thing is leaving everything else behind. Hopefully that’s not how it goes,” said Lance.
As for how long this may take to wrap up, officials say they’re taking it day by day.
