Wyoming
Evacuation Lifted For Pleasant Valley Fire, But Ranchers Worried For…
GUERNSEY — Emergency officials in Goshen and Platte counties have lifted evacuation orders on tiny communities north of Guernsey, Wyoming, threatened by a pesky wildfire that’s proved difficult to contain in an area the size of more than 33,000 football fields.
The evacuation order is the second emergency officials have lifted since Tuesday when two separate fires in the region merged to form an inferno that’s burned a 26,000-acre area and now appears stuck in steep and treacherous terrain in the Haystack Range.
This is a good thing as long as hundreds of firefighting personnel can keep it tamed in the tinderbox that locals say is a godforsaken mountainous region.
On Saturday, Tony Krotz, the Platte County emergency management coordinator, told 200 people at the Guernsey-Sunrise High School that evacuation orders for the northern Guernsey communities had been lifted at about 4 p.m.
Those communities, which have about 150 people living there, include Hartville, located about 5 miles north of Guernsey, and the canyon communities of Sunrise (1 mile east of Hartville) as well as residents who dot Pleasant Valley and Waylen Canyon roads.
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon told the audience at the hastily pulled together meeting that he would fight for more resources on the frontline of Wyoming’s wildfires.
Emergency officials said that higher priority states like California, Oregon and the U.S. West generally are taking these resources from Wyoming, listed at the bottom of the priority list because of its rural nature and sparse population of a half million people.
“This summer has really been tough,” said Gordon in the high school’s gymnasium that felt nearly as hot as the outside temperature of 100 degrees. “We are doing the best job we can to allocate resources, but virtually all of these resources are already allocated.”
Gordon said he would fight for more firefighting resources, like planes to map the fires or drop water and slurry.
Emergency officials said at the meeting that it may be another week before they can get a special plane with infrared mapping capabilities to fly over the Haystacks and give a better assessment of the fire’s size and how much of the prairie-scape has burned.
“My main thing for being here today is to tell you that we are 100% behind you,” Gordon said. “We are fighting hard to get the assets we need but they are stretched.”
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A 26,000 acre wildfire has been challenging for firefighters, especial for tiny communities north of Guernsey, Wyoming, which itself only has a population of 1,130. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) -
A fire smolders on Saturday south of U.S. Highway 26 near oil storage tanks owned by Tallgrass Energy in the background. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) -
A fire smolders on Saturday south of U.S. Highway 26 near oil storage tanks owned by Tallgrass Energy in the background. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily)
Where Is The Fire?
Tracking the fire has been difficult because of the rocky and steep terrain of the “hills,” as locals have dubbed the Haystacks.
The fire has swirled in an area ranging from U.S. Highway 26, linking Guernsey and Fort Laramie about 12 miles to the east, to the eastern fringe hamlets north of Guernsey that were under orders of evacuation on Friday and Saturday, and to the north to the Haystacks.
“The firefighters on the scene have advised me that they feel comfortable and safe to allow the residents of these communities to return once again,” said Krotz, who received a call from Platte County Fire Warden Aaron Clark shortly before the meeting to support the decision.
Thunderous applause from the audience erupted on that announcement.
“We’ve always said that if a fire gets in that area, we’re scared,” Krotz observed.
“We know what that train looks like and you know how dry it has been. We saw the winds change in more directions that one night,” he said of the Tuesday-Wednesday battle with the fire over a do-or-die, five-hour window from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m.
“We’re not out of the woods yet, but we got a break here for now,” he said.
As of Saturday, the fire is 30% contained, though some emergency officials say that area could be larger. Without a flyover by the plane with the infrared equipment, it’s difficult to come up with a better assessment.
The latest evacuation order came late Friday afternoon when a violent thunderstorm brought high winds to the area and caused firefighters to lose some of their hold over ditches and mounds of dirt dozed up that were built as a containment wall to keep the fire from spreading on the western front.
When the wildfire began threatening the Waylen Canyon Road area Friday, emergency officials didn’t think twice to evacuate everyone.
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More than 200 people showed up at the Guernsey-Sunrise High School to hear Goshen and Platte County emergency officials update them on the latest with the Pleasant Valley Fire, which has burned more than 26,000 acres. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) -
On left, Anne Lee and her husband, Tom Lee, got a firsthand look at the merging of the Haystack and Pleasant Valley fires late Tuesday when they visited a knoll near their home located at Road 3 and Tank Farm Road, south of U.S. Highway 26. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) -
More than 200 people showed up at the Guernsey-Sunrise High School to hear Goshen and Platte County emergency officials update them on the latest with the Pleasant Valley Fire, which has burned more than 26,000 acres. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) -
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon tells more than 200 people who showed up at the Guernsey-Sunrise High School that more resources are needed to fight wildfires in Wyoming. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily) -
More than 200 people showed up at the Guernsey-Sunrise High School to hear Goshen and Platte County emergency officials update them on the latest with the Pleasant Valley Fire, which has burned more than 26,000 acres. (Pat Maio, Cowboy State Daily)
Going Home
About 20 people from the Hartville area communities were evacuated to Camp Guernsey Joint Training Center just off U.S. Highway 26 to stay at one of their barracks on the military base.
The American Red Cross from Cheyenne set up a volunteer center to help coordinate the arrival of evacuees.
The latest flareup of the wildfire first reared up with flames several hundred feet high Tuesday and Wednesday.
That’s when the Pleasant Valley Fire combined with the Haystack Fire, creating the large burn area visible to the north of U.S. 26 along the arterial highway from Guernsey to Fort Laramie.
The historic community of Fort Laramie also was threatened by the fire at one point, but a canal 2 miles on the western fringe of town held the advance.
Along with thousands of acres of grass and forests, the fire also burned the family homestead of congresswoman Harriet Hageman, who grew up in the area.
Tyson Finnicum, a spokesman with the Wyoming Type 3 Team, said that a lightning strike in the Haymarket Range a week ago caused the Goshen County fire. The Pleasant Valley Fire, which is the official name of the combined fire, began Tuesday and is under investigation.
Finnicum’s Type 3 team was formed Thursday.
His team is an emergency classification level used by fire tracking agency National Interagency Fire Center and is made up of a small group of local, state and federal officials needed to help in the management of combating a wildfire.
They have set up an incident camp in Fort Laramie for firefighters to sleep and catch a breath.
Last Stand
Travis Pardue, the incident commander overseeing management of efforts to combat the fire, told Cowboy State Daily that about 120 firefighters have formed a “control line” on the northern flank of the fire near McGann Pass. That’s where they’ve been most of the day Saturday, he said.
The line has about 3 miles of water hoses strung together in the area that are helping to extinguish the fire, he said.
“We could be seeing smoke for weeks,” Pardue said.
The burn area in the Haystack range is between the McGinnis Pass and McCann Pass in Goshen County at about 5,000 feet in elevation. The range passes are located east of Whalen Canyon Road in the county and are located about 6 miles apart. The southern end of the fire is about 8 miles to the northeast of Guernsey, the area where the Pleasant Valley fire first started.
The biggest concern emerging from Saturday’s meeting seems to be future worries over the health and safety of cattle and horses.
Rancher Tom Lee and his wife Anne Lee live about 5 miles west of Fort Laramie south of U.S. Highway 26, which is an area that largely escaped the burn area to the north.
The couple visited a hill near Road 3 and Tank Farm Road where they were able to see the march of the Pleasant Valley Fire to the northern edge of U.S. Highway 26.
It’s where several oil tank farms owned by Enbridge, Tallgrass Energy, Sunoco and others are located.
“You could see the big flames from there and lots of smoke,” Tom Lee said. “We saw the two fires come together and the orange glow.”
“I thought we were in California,” Anne joked.
The Lees, who run a ranching operation of about 100 head of cattle, are worried about larger ranches that may struggle with finding pastures to feed their animals.
Some of the stacked bales of hay were burned in fields located to the north of U.S. Highway 26.
“They also need their fences repaired,” Tom Lee said. “We are just small guys. The bigger guys have problems.”
In his comments to 200 people Saturday, Gordon mentioned the possibility of helping with rebuilding fences with federal emergency money.
Cattle Surrounded By Fire
The Kasperbauer ranching family has about 220 head of cattle grazing near the Haystacks when the fire nearly locked them in.
Father Vince Kasperbauer and his son, Vince, were able to push the cattle out of the middle of the fire with a John Deere Gator utility vehicle, which kind of resembles a fancy golf cart with big gripping tires, and a frontend loader.
Side-by-side, the father and son pushed the cattle to the Cottonwood Draw into a tunnel under U.S. Highway 26, about halfway between Guernsey and Fort Laramie.
The fire torched roughly 7,600 of their family’s 8,500 acres, Vince Kasperbauer told Cowboy State Daily.
Next week, the family plans to haul the cattle to a ranch north of Wheatland to graze and eat hay there. Their plan is to move the cattle when rain is forecast in order to reduce the stress of the cattle, which already are feeling it.
“They were supposed to stay in the Haystack hills for the summer,” Kasperbauer said. But we’ve got to get them moved. “The 90-degree heat is stressing them.”
Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.
Wyoming
Wyoming authorities call on Rocky Mountain Power to explain role in massive November power outage
by Dustin Bleizeffer, WyoFile
The massive, multiple-utility power outage last fall that left some 250,000 customers across parts of Wyoming, South Dakota and Montana without electricity was the result of miscommunication and inadequate procedures during planned maintenance that required de-energizing a power line in southcentral Wyoming, according to a report.
The Nov. 13 incident left thousands of homes and businesses without power for 9.5 hours — longer, in some cases — and knocked out a coal-powered generator outside Glenrock. The unit at the Dave Johnston Power Plant remains offline, leaving Rocky Mountain Power to backfill some 300 megawatts of electricity — enough to power about 225,000 homes.
Without expressly assigning blame to any one party, the report — conducted by the Western Electricity Coordinating Council and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation — indicates a series of communication breakdowns between PacifiCorp (parent company of Rocky Mountain Power), the Western Area Power Administration and, to some degree, electrical grid coordinating teams.
While it’s unclear whether authorities such as the North American Electric Reliability Corporation might pinpoint fault and assess penalties, the Wyoming Public Service Commission has called on Rocky Mountain Power to appear at a hearing scheduled for 2:30 p.m. Wednesday. The commission wants to hear from the utility about “the specifics and details of the event and report,” a public notice announced, and it “may consider and take any action that is in the public interest.”
The hearing at the Public Service Commission’s office located at 2515 Warren Avenue, Suite 300, in Cheyenne, will also be livestreamed at this link.
What happened
According to the 49-page report published in June, PacifiCorp and the Western Area Power Administration were coordinating maintenance on their respective systems that, together, required temporarily de-energizing PacifiCorp’s Aeolus–Clover 500 kilovolt line, which runs east-west and is anchored, in part, by a substation near Medicine Bow.
The effort also required curtailing some local wind energy from feeding the grid, according to the report. But on the day of the planned maintenance, Nov. 13, there was confusion about whether the Western Area Power Administration would scrap its work, so wind energy wasn’t curtailed as originally planned.
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Wind turbines near Cheyenne poke into a colorful sunrise in January 2025. (Tennessee Watson/WyoFile)
The report indicates that modeling tools might have failed to accurately measure local grid conditions, so when the power line was de-energized, “power flow rapidly redistributed throughout the northeast portion” of the local grid. “Within six seconds,” according to the report, “an electrical island formed and collapsed, causing widespread effects across that portion of the interconnection.
“The disturbance,” the report continues, “culminated in the loss of more than 4,800 [megawatts] of generation from coal, natural gas, photovoltaic and wind resources.”
The cascading power failure began at about 12:45 p.m. on a Thursday, dragging down portions of service territories operated by Rocky Mountain Power, Black Hills Energy, Montana-Dakota Utilities and some rural electric co-ops.
The report points to failures in communication, process deficiencies and inadequate modeling tools. Wind energy was not “identified as a contributing factor,” according to the report. It credits both battery storage and wind energy throughout the impacted area for supporting “a faster frequency recovery across the interconnection” and for providing “readily available capacity during system restoration.”
This article was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here with permission. WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
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