A few drops of rain fell Sunday on the massive "Juneberry 3" fire in the northwest corner of Roseau County and the wind remained light, helping firefighters feel they had nearly contained the blaze that ignited early Wednesday afternoon.
Even the mere two-tenths of rain expected to fall overnight across the area will make a "dramatic" difference, dampening down the grass and brush that had been tinder dry after six weeks of warm, dry weather, said Ron Sanow, spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
The fight went from being called 60 percent contained Saturday morning to 85 percent contained by Saturday night.
Sanow stayed with the 85-percent-contained figure Sunday, mostly because the final 15 percent, in the northeast corner of the burn area, simply can't be evaluated yet.
But the main work appears to be over, he says.
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"Other than mopping up, in fact, we started 'gridding.' That's when we put people 100 feet apart and walking side-to-side. Anything that turns up smoking is just pounded down and beat into submission. And that's a very good sign. That means we are drawing to the end."
The entire perimeter, about 30 miles, will be "gridded" this way,
The goal is to get a 100-foot swath of "clean area" around the entire perimeter of the fire, he said.
"Then, it will be decided whether that is safe enough to let the other stuff burning on in the interior, with the weather projected, to let those few smoldering things just run."
The area burned is about 28,828 acres, or about 5,000 acres smaller than earlier estimated, Sanow said.
Once firefighters were able Sunday to get a better look at the burned area, using GPS equipment, they could better estimate the size, he said.
About 208 firefighters have been working the fire that was discovered about 1:30 p.m. Wednesday about 10 miles northwest of Greenbush, Minn. by a truck driver hauling a bulldozer in as a preventive measure.
When the ultra-high winds hit Thursday and Friday, the fire blew out of control, growing fast.
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The firefight has involved lots of trucks, dozers, helicopters and aircraft.
"We have spent $425,000 on this fire," Sanow said.
It's an area roughly 11 miles long north-to-south, up to the Canadian border, and at its widest on the north end is nearly seven miles east-to-west, tapering down toward the south to nearly a point, according to a DNR map.
The 28,828 acres are equivalent to about 45 square miles.
That makes it the second-largest fire in Minnesota this year, after the Pagami Creek fire in the Boundary Waters, which was more than three times as big and contained about three weeks ago, Sanow said.
One area of peat bog remains burning in the south-central part of the Juneberry 3 fire, which gets its name from the township where it started.
Meanwhile, the second, smaller fire, the Cannon Fire, that began Friday about 10 miles west of the main fire, in Kittson County, also includes expanses of peat burning within its 2,000 acres. The decayed organic material that makes up peat often is harvested as a fuel and often is a precursor to coal being formed.
It can burn for a long time and is difficult to extinguish, Sanow said.
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Fortunately, the burn area is nearly all state-owned land or wildlife management areas without buildings or habitants. A few outbuildings have burned, but no one has been injured; one firefighter had a twisted back, Sanow said.
Sanow said he was reminded that this fire began 101 years almost to the day of the deadly Spooner-Baudette fire that began Oct. 7, 1910, burning up to 360,000 acres across Lake of the Woods County, killing about 43 people and leaving thousands homeless as all or parts of several towns burned down.
That fire -- coming 14 years after the even more deadly "Great Hinckley Fire," which killed more than 400 -- helped spur the formation of the predecessor forestry service that became the DNR to manage the state's forests and grasslands.
