Carlton Station Officer Brandon Richison led Fire District 6’s initial attack on the Gold Creek Fire.
The Carlton fire station officer for Okanogan County Fire District 6 got the call shortly before 5 p.m. on June 22 while working his farm, just across the Methow River from the station.
“I got the tones for an incident that was happening near Gold Creek and 153,” Station Officer Brandon Richison recalled in an interview earlier this week. “I walked out my door and I looked down valley, and I saw the column already forming.”
A mower had started a fire in tall, dry grass on the former Clees farm at 1941 Highway 153, about 3.25 miles south of Carlton. And the wind was picking up on this warm early-summer afternoon.
Richison and fellow Carlton firefighter Bob Burns jumped into the station’s brush truck and were first on the scene. They saw the fire climbing the steep slope in the back of the Clees property toward heavy timber.
It was also heading toward the unoccupied house.
By the time Richison and Burns had pulled their hoses off the truck, the back of the house and a side deck were burning. The house was surrounded by fallen timber, plywood, junked vehicles, tires and other litter. Two or three vehicles were burning, but Richison concentrated his efforts on the backside of the house while Burns attacked the deck.
“I didn’t try to hit the vehicles at all at this time,” he said. “We only have 500 gallons. … We had to kind of conserve a little bit.”
A Winthrop fire engine eventually doused the vehicle fires, the firefighters in full structure-protection gear with breathing tanks.
As firefighters braced for a possible explosion from old fuel or oils inside the vehicles, they heard discarded propane tanks and other “random things … kind of popping off” in the backyard, Richison recalled.
Swirling winds threw debris and started spot fires near a barn, behind state and federal firefighters who were advancing up the hill toward the fire. District 6 knocked those smaller fires down, with the help of a Department of Natural Resources helicopter bucket drop. Local firefighters also saved the house.
But the leading edge of the blaze topped the hill above the Clees farm and made a run toward Gold Creek.
By the next day, Gold Creek residents were in level 2 evacuation. But a multiagency response team had the fire under control within a week. As of Tuesday (July 9), the Gold Creek Fire burned 278 acres but hadn’t destroyed any homes — thanks in no small part to the Carlton station’s quick response that Saturday afternoon.