Bill Janklow saved Keystone during 2002 Battle Creek fire

By Bev Pechan

The only time I ever talked to Gov. Bill Janklow personally was at a cracker barrel session at Rapid City’s Parkway Café not long after the Battle Creek fire of Aug. 18-25, 2002. It threatened and nearly reached Keystone and most certainly would have taken the town with it, if it had not been for the efforts of Bill Janklow.
I wanted to thank him for saving our town. He reached out to shake hands and when I mentioned the words “thank you” he withdrew, seemed to be caught off guard and was somewhat embarrassed. With an almost timid voice, he said, “I didn’t do anything. It is all those guys out on the fire line that did the work.”
True, but if Janklow hadn’t intervened when he did, there would not have been the opportunity for the tremendous efforts put out by all those who worked frantically to keep the flames from coming that last less than a mile into Keystone from the east.
And the first area the fire would have reached would have been the homes and trailer houses clustered together with a row of propane tanks a block long.
It was an eerie feeling to look across the street at Keystone’s city park and see several tankers from other parts of South Dakota waiting on the infield for the fire to reach its first populated area and trying to stop it with hose power only. The smoke filled my nostrils on this otherwise quiet Sunday morning. I had packed what I could and came back to check on the situation after driving through dense smoke on the way to Rapid City that headlights could barely penetrate at 2 a.m. that day. This was the fire that began in the area of the Children’s Home Society, burned toward Hermosa and then doubled back and split into a Y-shape, threatening both towns of Keystone and Rockerville and easily crossing the four lanes of Highway 16 in the process.
Slurry planes had been ordered in from another state, but they sat on the tarmac in Rapid City, unable to fly because of federal regulations concerning the area. The fire was totally uncontrolled and at the time, uncontrollable.
As the flames continued their race toward Keystone, Gov. Janklow was at the command center along Highway 16, taking a quick lunch break. The late “Torb” Torbison, who had delivered sandwiches from a local restaurant, told this reporter that Janklow was eating his meal when he received the news that federal mandates would not allow firefighters access to some areas in the path of the fire. According to Torb, Janklow had an immediate reaction and, spitting his food as he talked, exclaimed “---- the feds! This may be federal property but it’s in South Dakota!” They would just have to deal with him later, he added.
Janklow ordered every state bulldozer available to the scene to start a fire line and he wanted the slurry planes released to do their job. The appropriate groups sprung into action and were miraculously able to finally halt the oncoming firestorm before it reached the city limits.
The Battle Creek Fire was the top fire priority in the nation, according to a breaking news story in the Sioux City Journal, written by Nate Tullis on Aug. 19, 2002. At that time, the fire was at 6,600 acres, but went on to consume over 11,000 acres in a steep and inaccessible part of Black Hills back country.
“The fire, about two miles north of Keystone, was most active on its southwest side,” Tullis quoted fire information officer Rick Hudson, as saying. Winds at the fire zone gusted to 45 miles per hour, but died down at dusk, though they caused the fire to begin spotting, or jumping miles ahead, because of the wind and resulting crowning. Tullis reported that another fire official, Joe Harbach, stated at that point: “The fire was more than the initial team could handle. They were the first line of defense.”
According to Tullis, “Harbach said a top-level management team was called in right away. ‘We ordered these folks early. We knew the fire was going to be big, and the complexity level far exceeded our capabilities’ he said.” The Battle Creek Fire was classified as a Type 1 fire from the start – the most dangerous type of forest fire.
The blaze at that point was five miles long from near Rockerville, southeast past Rushmore Cave and had a “mile-wide finger” running north to Pine Grove school. It was about four miles from Mount Rushmore National Memorial with Rockerville and Hayward previously evacuated and Keystone on standby that Sunday morning. It would have been Rockerville’s second evacuation in as many days.
Tullis reported: “Gov. Bill Janklow said he was frustrated by the way the Forest Service handled the fire. ‘I’m drawing a line in the sand and will not allow South Dakota to be destroyed one fire at a time,’” Janklow told the press, referring to an earlier fire in the Northern Hills that would not allow slurry bombers to cross the interstate to get water to a major fire there. “I am sick and tired of looking into the eyes of South Dakotans who have had to run for their lives,” the governor stated in typical Janklow fashion.
The previous evening, National Guard bulldozers dug a 4 ½-mile line around Keystone, but, because of the winds and spotting, there was uncertainty about whether or not the fire could be restrained. When Janklow learned that next day that large boulders had been placed on fire trails by the Forest Service to keep the public out, he went ballistic – hence the sandwich incident and the call for bulldozers.
Emergency arrangements were made to house Keystone evacuees at the South Dakota School of Mines campus in Rapid City in the event the town needed to be emptied and 600 personnel, including local volunteers and firefighters from as far away as Sioux Falls settled in for the expected holocaust, which, fortunately did not happen, due to the combined interagency actions taken and the intense labor effort by all concerned, ram-rodded by Janklow, who gave white-knuckle rides to various officials, racing to and from multiple observation sites.
Approximately five days later, the fire was declared controlled and mop-up efforts began. It was reported locally that bugs were already invading the damaged timber area as it continued to smolder. The Federal Emergency Management Agency – or FEMA – approved a grant at the height of the Battle Creek fire to pay for 75 percent of state and local firefighting costs.
This is, I know, only one of many situations Gov. Bill Janklow responded to in his long career of public service because he felt he needed to be there. He may have even showed up if he weren’t governor, but the fact that he was meant that he knew which avenues needed to be taken to protect lives and he didn’t consider political correctness when there were problems to solve. I personally admired that about him.