ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- An evacuation directive remained in effect Tuesday night for a rural Fairbanks subdivision threatened by a forest fire, but most residents chose to stay in their homes.
Fire officials on the 484,600-acre Boundary fire northeast of Fairbanks on Monday night issued the evacuation directive to residents of the Haystack subdivision, which contains about 80 homes and about 150 people.
However, just 14 people took advantage of a Red Cross shelter set up at Randy Smith Middle School, said fire information officer Chris Papen, and many subdivision residents chose to monitor the fire at their homes.
``A lot of those folks are holding out and watching it closely,'' Papen said.
The fire is considered 20 percent contained.
The subdivision is a mile or so east of 10.5 Mile Elliott Highway and about 20 miles north of Fairbanks. A fire break that varies according to vegetation, and in some places is just the width of a bulldozer blade, separates the subdivision from forest land.
Erratic winds pushed the southwest edge of the fire toward the subdivision and by Monday night there was some ``minor slop over'' of fire across the line, four miles east of the subdivision, Papen said.
``It reached our trigger point,'' Papen said.
Crews on Tuesday cleaned up parts of the line compromised by fire. When conditions are right, Papen said, crews will ignite a fire to remove fuel such as brush and grass from the wildfire.
``That will be the objective, to get the black on the line so you have a better defensible position,'' he said.
Crews hope to have aircraft assisting them on a controlled burn but heavy smoke continued to hamper air operations and the conditions are not likely to change this week, said Ted Fathauer, National Weather Service lead forecaster in Fairbanks. A temperature inversion, in which temperatures increase with increasing altitude, kept smoke from dissipating.
``It gets warmer as you go farther up,'' he said, keeping cleaner, higher air from mixing with the smoke.
Inversions are common in the Interior and contribute to high levels of carbon monoxide trapped in Fairbanks in winter. Fathauer called the summer version a ``nasty meteorological Catch 22.''
To get rid of the inversion, which tends to trap smoke, the lower atmosphere must warm up, Fathauer said. However, the smoke radiates heat away.
``It's like a shade on your windows,'' he said.
The weather service predicted a smattering of rain and light wind but nothing to change the inversion this week, Fathauer said.
Nine helicopters and 830 people are working to contain the fire.
By the latest estimates, 469 Alaska wildfires have burned more than 3.6 million acres. Fire officials reported 11 new fires Tuesday and 109 active fires.
The inversion that kept some aircraft grounded had the positive effect of keeping wind down, slowing the spread of fires elsewhere in Interior Alaska.
Near Eagle east of Fairbanks and just inside the Canada border, information officer Greg Kujuwa reported little expansion of the Eagle Complex fires. So far 614,565 acres have burned. Crews are working to contain the Deer Creek fire six miles northwest of Eagle and the Dawson No. 31 fire, which is on the opposite side of the Yukon River from Eagle and Eagle Village.
Growth also was minimal at the Central Complex, where 170,000 acres have burned, said information officer Roland Emetaz.
At the Taylor Highway Complex, fire information officer Kevin Koechlein said smoke kept flights from assessing the Billy Creek Fire, 10 to 14 miles north of Dot Lake, an Alaska Highway community of about 35 people, 155 road miles southeast of Fairbanks. Humidity slowed other fires in the complex.
A 100-acre fire reported Monday night about 1.5 miles off the Alaska Highway and 15-20 miles from Northway was attacked with retardant, two loads of smokejumpers and a ground crew, Koechlein said, and suppression efforts continued Tuesday.
The Solstice Complex north of Fort Yukon, a Yukon River community of 575 about 145 miles northeast of Fairbanks, showed low to moderate activity but smoldered and continued to put heavy smoke into the air, said spokesman Jeremy Pris. About 547,351 acres have burned there.
