"Watford City Fire got called out Friday night for several hours. They went home and went to bed and then Army Guard was called out at 2 30 in the morning and that's when everything just unfolded."
Carolyn Jappe is McKenzie County Emergency Manager. She says the weather that week was unlike anything she'd ever encountered with windswept flames scorching the countryside.
"We were sending out emergency alerts that night. I was making sure everybody was fed because we had departments from Montana and Williston and Trenton and Dunn County and Billings County and from there after I left Army Guard when daylight hit I had to go feed firefighters over in the Haystack area which was Dunn Fire and Grassy Butte Fire and from there I went to Keene and that was it was just I've never seen anything like it when I pulled up to the first fire truck the firefighters their faces were black completely black and all you could see is their little kind of white eyes thank goodness I had some eye drops for them."
Jappe says while she was kept busy trying to move from fire to fire crews were also combating fires miles away in Williams County and the community of Ray.
"Their fires were actually a lot larger than ours in fact it was the largest in state history. Ray had a 37,000 and all together between Ray and Tioga I think it was 89,000 acres so their fire was bigger than ours but we had two different fires on two parts of the county too so all together I mean like they say there was probably two years of wildland fires in one day."
Jappe says two people were killed in those fires by Ray.
Officials have said the McKenzie County fires started after the gusty winds blew around flames from a natural gas flare which ignited nearby dry grasses. The company Targa Resources Corporation has claimed responsibility and has helped with reconstruction efforts.
Ryan Melin is fire officer with the North Dakota Forest Service. When looking back at the days of battling those fires Melin says there's only one way to describe the events that unfolded.
"An amazing bad experience the size the scope and the scale of those fires for those three four or five days that we had on the landscape is really something they see on national tv and you know and those fires did make national national news network we had resources coming from all over the nation to help us we were able to get those scooper planes they were actually down in Boise fighting a fire down there and in our fire actually ranked higher nationally with values at risk so those those planes came up and helped us out."
Perry Ecker is a rancher from Watford City and lives in the southeast part of town.
"The fire went mostly October 5th and 6th but then it actually went another 10 or 12 days in places farther east but we were up east of our ranch headquarters fighting the fire in the middle of the night and we had to go back to to the yard by the house a couple times to get more supplies and the house was or the yard was plumbed full of smoke it was real windy but there was so much smoke the smoke just stayed there and we couldn't see the house and we thought the house had burned up but it hadn't we didn't lose any houses in that fire I don't think which was fortunate."
But while the ranch headquarters escaped without damage another part of the Ecker Ranch did lose several outbuildings and then there's the ranch land itself.
"We lost all of our federal summer pasture which is probably three or four thousand acres and then half of our deeded land burned up and I think we own I think there was about 15 or 1600 acres of that that burned up but we didn't lose any hay for some reason." I was just gonna ask about livestock. "Yeah, no we lost a few cows in the Badlands and most of them we never found. They just burned up or you know Badlands is so rough and then their coyotes eat them as soon as they're dead so you can't find anything."
Ecker says he and his family are grateful for the region-wide response and fortunate for how things turned out.
"My wife and I were in our mature years. We've had three different catastrophic fires in the last 25 years on our ranch and I was glad that we weren't 20 years old and dead broke and mortgaged to the hill so so financially we were more able to survive this time."
For Carolyn Jappe, the work didn't stop when the fires were extinguished. She's taking lessons learned during the fire and has started building on that.
"So I know in our county in the fire chiefs we've increased our mutual aid agreement. I touched base with our oil companies that I train and exercise with all the time and I said hey guys and gals I said I'm there for you right I come to your trainings your exercises so if something ever happens like that again can I have a member of your team and within four hours every person I emailed said absolutely and it was like so they're there for us too so building those relationships ahead of time is so important and it's just you know it works both ways. "
Going back to Ryan Melin. He says while North Dakota may not experience such horrific fires on a frequent basis, many times the conditions are there.
"You know light flashy fuels grass fires is a common denominator in tragedy fires you think we get to think that you know the big fires we see on tv with the 200 foot flame links that's going to kill people and it's more times than not it's a grass fire."
Melin says if there's something people should take away from the fires of last year is prevention and careful handling of any fire and to keep in mind those that respond when the call is made.
"Most of the people that fought these fires were volunteers they weren't getting paid uh you know they left their jobs they left their families. So you know, support your local fire departments."
For Prairie Public, I'm Todd McDonald.