TRIBUNE

Fire crews battled three different wildland fires Friday afternoon that closed the highway near the Arrow Bridge on U.S. Highway 12 east of Lewiston.

It was the first in a series of grass fires and other weather-related incidents that kept emergency crews and firefighters busy into the evening Friday.

Nez Perce County Fire Chief Ron Hall said the Arrow fires started near the highway between milepost 16 and milepost 19 - Arrow and Cherrylane - shortly before 4 p.m. By 6:15 p.m., two of the fires had burned together into one approximately 35-acre blaze, said Idaho Department of Lands spokesman Tim Tevebaugh. The other smaller fire remained at around 3 acres, he said. Tevebaugh did not have a containment estimate Friday evening.

The fires started on the side of the road opposite the river and burned southward up the hillside in brush and timber, Tevebaugh said. The fires were likely caused by human activity, he said. The status of structures threatened by the fires was not known Friday evening.

Emergency crews closed the highway between Arrow Bridge and Cottonwood Creek Road during the firefighting effort. According to the Idaho State Police, the east-west route reopened around 9:45 p.m. Traffic was rerouted across the Cherrylane Bridge during the closure.

Crews from the Idaho Department of Lands, Clearwater-Potlatch Timber Protection Association, Nez Perce County Fire Department and Nez Perce Tribal Fire battled the blaze with engines and hand crews. The department of lands also sent a helicopter to drop buckets of water from the Clearwater River in an attempt to douse the fires, Hall said.

High winds later Friday kept fire and police crews throughout the Lewiston-Clarkston Valley busy late into the evening with downed power lines and small fires reported throughout the area.

High winds and thunderstorms with 35 mph winds and gusts as high as 50 mph were reported around 8 p.m. at Lewiston, according to the National Weather Service, preceding many of the reported incidents.

Power was cut to more than 2,500 Avista customers in Clarkston, 655 people in Grangeville and about 130 Lewiston residents amid the storm. Weather was blamed for many of the outages.

Whitcom dispatch reported several downed power lines and a few small fires in Asotin County. Lewiston Police Department dispatchers reported 10 to 12 power pole fires, including some that turned into small fires. The Clarkston Fire Department reported sparking transformers. None of the incidents caused severe damage, according to officials.