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Firefighters from Harpswell and neighboring departments labored until late Saturday night and much of Sunday to successfully contain a stubborn woodland fire that began Halloween afternoon and smoldered for nearly 24 hours.
Nobody was hurt and no structures were damaged by the blaze.
After hikers at the Devil’s Back trails on Orr’s Island called 911 to report smelling smoke near Gun Point Cove around 4 p.m. Saturday, Harpswell town and volunteer firefighters scoured the area to find its source, but were initially unable to locate it.
Just after 5:30 p.m., as the sun was setting, emergency dispatchers received a call from a pilot who was flying over the area and identified the blaze smoldering in the spreading darkness. With help from the pilot, first responders were able to track it to just over an acre of woodland above unoccupied seasonal cottages along Seal Ledge Lane, just north of the Route 24 bridge connecting Orr’s and Great islands.
“We had two or three calls for a smoke investigation, but the fire was laying so low, we couldn’t really tell the source at first,” said Sean Hall, a town firefighter and deputy chief of the Orr’s and Bailey Islands Fire Department. “It wasn’t until someone spotted it from the sky and reported it to dispatch that we were able to narrow down the location.”
“When we got here, we had an active fire in the woods,” Hall said. The fire wasn’t so much burning visibly above the ground as it was smoldering — and spreading — beneath a bed of vegetation left drier than usual by the recent drought.
“There’s so much duff, so much leaf litter and detritus from the trees, that the fire burns down into root systems,” he said. “The trees start burning and the fire smolders underground.”
While not as dramatic and devastating as the increasingly familiar western wildfires, an underground fire has the potential to grow and threaten structures and people nearby. Because of that risk, an “all-hands” call went out Saturday to first responders from the town of Harpswell and the volunteer departments from Orr’s and Bailey islands, Cundy’s Harbor and Harpswell Neck.
Firefighters left Halloween celebrations and family dinners to gather at the fire scene, pulling hoses through the woods to pour water on hot spots that revealed themselves with glowing embers, swelling clouds of smoke, and, in some cases, trees that turned into torches in the night sky.
Firefighters labored for roughly five hours tamping down the fire before, exhausted, they were able to pause for the night.
“We called it quits around 11 p.m.,” Hall said, explaining that the cooling air allowed the fire to “bed down” overnight. Early Sunday, the Harpswell forces — joined by crews from West Bath and Topsham — went back to work as the sun rose, the air warmed and the hot spots rekindled.
By afternoon, they were able to roll up their hoses and return to their stations to clean equipment and get ready for the next call. Hall said they would check back periodically in coming days to be sure the blaze hadn’t sprung back to life.
Fighting a woods fire requires massive amounts of water, and tanker trucks from the three Harpswell departments and their out-of-town partners shuttled back and forth between supply ponds and the fire scene, providing an uninterrupted supply for the hoses. That was critical in a community without a municipal water supply and network of hydrants.
“We don’t have pressurized hydrants, so having the three volunteer departments available with their tank trucks to do water shuttle” is critical, Hall said. “They’re instrumental. Couldn’t do the job without them.”
Editor’s note: Jeffrey Good is a volunteer emergency medical technician with the Orr’s and Bailey Islands Fire Department.
