A growing cloud of smoke drifted over the Shell gas station in Kachina Village on Sunday, one indicator of the Pocket Fire’s explosion in size as it inched toward the communities south of Flagstaff.
Residents at the Shell told KNAU they felt anxious as they prepared for a possible evacuation. Kachina Village, Forest Highlands and Pine Del all have been placed under “Set” status, the phase just before a “Go” evacuation order.
Fire officials reported the blaze had expanded to more than 11,000 acres as of Monday morning, growing almost five times its size since late last week, though thousands of acres have been intentionally burned by crews looking to manage the fire. The Pocket Fire remains at 0% containment.
Cheyenne Grabiec lives in Kachina Village and says he’s worried — the Pocket Fire seems worse than past fires that’ve burned nearby, such as the 2014 Slide Fire.
“It feels a little scarier, just because the wind we've had the last few days, and just how dry it's been,” says Grabiec. “And then also just kind of reading that the fire is at no containment, kind of that hard-to-reach area. So it's a little scarier this time around.”
Kachina Village residents like Grabiec have not been instructed to evacuate yet, but officials say people who know leaving will take them a long time should consider departing now.
Grabiec says he’s packed up his belongings and is ready to leave for a friend’s house in downtown Flagstaff.
In a surreal moment, he told KNAU he received a notice from his insurance company on Sunday saying it doesn’t want to cover his house because it’s in a wildfire danger zone.
“I'm going to definitely challenge it, but it's definitely frustrating and annoying,” Grabiec says as smoke wafts overhead. “That just happened. I got my letter today.”
Meanwhile, Shell employee Rhonda Gutierrez has also been going over evacuation plans in her head. She’s noticed customers at the gas station are starting to get concerned.
“I was changing the trashes, and someone in [a] truck said, ‘Are you evacuating now? You know, you got the go status.’ … So I checked inside, and my coworker said, ‘No, we're on set status,’” Gutierrez says. “I got things kind of planned, like a general idea what I'm going to do. Just try to keep it simple. I'm going to stay with my daughter.”
Triston Herrick also works at the Shell. He just purchased a mobile home in Kachina Village that he’s put thousands of dollars into, but it’s an older model, so he wasn’t able to get fire insurance for it.
“It's terrifying. I mean, you save up for years and try to get some somewhere in life, and then something like this happens,” says Herrick. “There's panic stirring, there's an uneasy feeling. No one knows what's going to happen.”
Some people have begun to evacuate Kachina Village, Herrick says, but there’s another group that wants to stay as long as they can.
“They've used the term, ‘I'm going down with my ship, I'm not going to leave until I see the fire is immediately on my doorstep. I'm going to be prepared, but I'm not leaving until it's here,’” he says. “And then you have the vice versa or the other end of that coin, where there's people right when it went into ‘Set,’ they're gone this morning when we got hit with the ‘Set’ notification.”
Fire managers say the Pocket Fire could get closer to Flagstaff, though critical wildfire conditions are likely to ease up this week.
