The firefight in the northern Minnesota woods isn’t over yet.

But fire crews say their battle against the flames is making progress.

“The Camp House fire is up to 73% contained,” declares Micah Bell, a spokesperson for the Eastern Area Incident Management Team. “That’s an amazing feat over the past few days.”

Authorities say the Jenkins Creek wildfire — now 13% contained — was caused by a human, but they say they’re still investigating.

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588 firefighters are now on the ground battling both fires, with more than 28,000 acres ablaze.

But how those fires are burning is changing.

“The fire’s no longer crowning, from what we understand,” says Jim Englin, a Minnesota State Patrol helicopter pilot. “It means running across the top of the trees, it’s mainly under the canopy sort of stuff, running along the ground.”

Still, the risk continues for fire crews on the front lines.

That’s where the Minnesota Air Rescue Team, or MART, comes into play.

“Our flight time from here is maybe eight minutes to the location, anywhere in the fire zone,” Englin explains. “There’s no way to get an ambulance to everyone. We can get there with the helicopter to get a line to them, get help for who has to get out.”

The MART team, stationed this week at Two Harbors Airport, includes a state patrol helicopter and pilot— and two St. Paul firefighters who are trained as rescue specialists.

They use a 100-foot “short-haul” line, and a sleeping bag-like device, dropped to the forest floor, to extract injured firefighters to safety.

“(The pilot) actually leans out the side of the helicopter to look down on us,” notes rescue specialist Jeremy Barta. “They’re able to pinpoint the location where we need to go. Somebody who’s lost or injured, we can put them in a device and bring them out on the end of that short haul line.”  

Right now, the team is on standby.

Experts say with these huge blazes, firefighters can face hazards like falling snags — partly burned trees that collapse — to broken ankles on rugged terrain — to injuries from chainsaws.

“There’s a fairly high incidence of injuries along fire lines due to trees falling and injuring people,” Barta says.
 
In serious cases, time can be of the essence.

“Some of these areas, it could take them up to two, three hours to hike into certain locations, to get them out of there,” Englin says. “Once you’ve located the victim, how do you get them out if they’re in a basket or if they’re not ambulatory in any way.”

The MART team, which was first deployed in 2013, has worked on all kinds of rescues — from searching for lost children in rural areas to locating hikers on the north shore.

This is their first operation at a wildfire of this size.

“The challenging part now is a lot of the fire has moved into some very remote areas, not accessible easily by road,” Englin notes. “That’s where we come into play, there’s no way to get an ambulance into anyone. We can get in there with the helicopter to get a line to them. Get help for who has to get out.”

Meanwhile, on the ground, fire teams called hand crews continue the battle, using shovels, rakes, and chainsaws to literally scrape down to the soil to stop a fire in its path.

“Handline, we call it,” Bell explains. “Reinforcing that handline, which is scraped down to the mineral soil, and then reinforcing that on the sides of that handline, by cutting back the trees and the brush and whatnot to really make a good firebreak.”

He says firefighters are also using two 25-pound drones to track the fires.

“They’re big commercial drones and have an infrared camera on them, so they’re looking for heat,” Bell says. “We’re flying those around the perimeter and within the perimeter a little bit.”

The MART team says it’s staying in place through Thursday, on a rotating basis with other agencies.

Barta says there’s been little precipitation in the fire zones.

“It’s still dry and kind of windy,” Barta says. “But there’s a lot of people working the fire right now.”

5 EYEWITNESS NEWS asked Bell if there’s a timeline for when the fires might be extinguished.

“There will be an end at some point, a recovery phase has already started. That will last a long period of time,” he says. “It’s getting there. I can’t really put a date on it, none of us really can. Conditions change, but we’re making good progress toward that end date, whatever it happens to be.”