On Friday morning, Utah Fire Info’s Facebook page noted that the fire was now 14% contained and that evacuees from 150 residences in North Ogden have been allowed to return home.

Sierra Hellstrom, public information officer with the Northern Utah Type 3 Incident Management Team, told the Standard-Examiner on Friday afternoon that a quick Thursday evening rainstorm didn’t do much to douse the fire directly, but it aided firefighting efforts somewhat.

“The fire is looking really good today,” she said. “The storm that came through yesterday didn’t provide any precipitation on the fire itself, but it brought in a lot of moisture to the area, which helps raise the humidity quite a bit, and the cooler temperatures made a big difference in being able to see decreased fire activity. It helped firefighters get around the perimeter a little bit more and start making progress on those hot spots because they were a lot more visible.”

She said fire activity continued Friday on some portions of the fire where heavier vegetation is present and that ground resources were tackling these areas along with aircraft resources as needed.

And while initial estimates had the fire pegged as having burned over 750 acres, Hellstrom said that a more thorough inspection has shown the fire to be significantly smaller.

“The initial 754 acres was done via a drone as an estimate,” she said. “It’s always a lot harder to find out acreage on a cliffy, hilly fire like we have here rather than when they’re on flat land fires where it’s really easy to draw a boundary around it. The little crevices on the mountain and the canyons make the perimeter a little bit more difficult to gauge.”

She said a helicopter survey showed around 577 acres has burned at this point.

“We were able to repopulate last night,” Hellstrom said. “We don’t have full containment on the western portion by the homes, but we felt comfortable enough to move them from a red evacuation to a yellow, which means, ‘Set’ — still stay prepared as conditions may change, but they’re no longer actively evacuated, which was a big win for us to feel comfortable enough for us to put them back in their homes.”

She noted that none of the homes have been lost, but Friday was a day for assessing whether there was property damage caused to any of the evacuated residences.

“They’re actually doing home assessments today,” she said. “That’s part of what some of the crews are doing along with some of the homeowners and insurance companies to determine how much or if damage might have been done, because the fire did burn fairly close to some of those homes.”

Hellstrom said the only structures the fire has destroyed so far were a utility pump house and a small communications shed higher up on the mountain.

She said the weather is still a concern going into the weekend.

“We still have predicted storms coming in, and along with the storms often comes erratic, gusty winds,” she said. “We’re trying to be conscientious of those hot spots where any little flare up could catch any hot spots on fire and blow any ashes and embers over the line. That’s always our big concern — making sure that we can keep the fire within its current perimeter.”

One of the great scourges of wildfires in mountainous terrain comes well after the fire is out. With so much vegetation destroyed and more exposed soil, landslides become a concern as precipitation returns to the area.

Hellstrom said that assessments of the landslide potential are coming along with any needed mitigation efforts.

“As we get closer to containment, we’ll bring in what are called burned area emergency response people where they come in and they do evaluations of the erosion probability and put in some mitigation efforts in the areas that might impact the homes,” she said. “Some of the work will happen right away and some of it will start taking place over the next couple of weeks.”

She said this includes placing brush and vegetation over the fire lines that were created to slow down the fire.

Hellstrom added that crews have been able to draw down somewhat, from 200 working on the fire on Thursday to around 150 as of Friday morning.

“I expect that to continue to go down as we make progress here,” she said.

She also reminded the public that, unless they are residents of the houses in the area or are somehow involved in the fire response, their presence is not needed at this time.

“The fire area is closed,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of cars, because we repopulated last night, they’ve just been driving up in or hiking up in. The scary part is we’ve had a really great safety record on this fire with no reportable accidents or injuries and one of our big concerns is there’s still active fires and there’s still hot spots. Even when we get containment,  that doesn’t necessarily mean there aren’t hot spots in the fire (area).”