9:00 AM April 19, 2022 Crooks Fire Operations update by Incident Commander Cory Carlson.

You can watch the FaceBook video below, or just read the transcript.

Good morning, my name is Cory Carlson.

I’m the incident commander for the Crooks fire. I’ll give you an update on what happened last night and plans for today.

So we had a really good night last night. The Crooks fires this morning at sitting at about 750 acres. We were able to take advantage of the nighttime temperatures and get some additional resources in in the evening.

And we were able to primarily engage in structure protection last night, around camp Kipa, Mountain Pine Acres, and some scattered structures, you know, immediately adjacent to the Union lookout area, so very successful there.

We were also able to initiate a burnout along the 261 road, moving east towards five points.

You know, the burnouts. The purpose of that was to try to avoid any further fire spread to the north. That’s going to be tested today with the winds. But you know, the burnout was successful. We have engines holding that piece of line this morning and they’ll continue to hold that line all day.

On the western side, we were able to tie in from the burn out on the 261 road and head south along the Senator Highway and try to tie in towards the heel of the fire. That burnout was also very successful.

And again, we’ll try to hold the fire on the east side of the Senator Highway, and on the north side or on the south side of the 261 today.

So the biggest challenge for today is a red flag warning for low RH and high winds. We’re expecting RHs around 10% today, and we’re expecting winds 25 to 35 miles an hour with gusts to 50. So that’s going to be the challenge today.

The focus first thing this morning is to get aviation, we have large air tankers, and very large air tankers, on order first thing this morning. We’ll start reinforcing some of our primary control lines. And then we’ll we also have five helicopters.

So we’re going to get the helicopters up this morning. Start dropping water and get some boots on the ground, to help kind of tie up some of these edges in and around the structures, but it’s going to be a very challenging day today.

You know the sheriff’s office will be posting a message about evacuation status, but all the evacuations that were in place last night with Ready, Set, Go are are still in place today.

Areas like Breezy Pines, Potato Patch, Walker, Lower Wolf Creek area, if you live in any of those areas, you should be on high alert, be watching, listen to the news, be watching Social Media and be aware of the evac notices.

With those winds, things can change change drastically in a moment’s notice. And you need to be ready to get out of there.

So we’ll give an update this evening. We’re hoping for a successful day of holding this fire and we’ll get more updates as they come available. Thank you.

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