U.S. Forest Service Public Information Officer Sierra Hellstrom told the Standard-Examiner on Tuesday the fire hadn’t grown beyond the 134 acres quoted the previous couple of days and was still 50% contained.

“The fire is continuing to see similar activity that we saw after that initial attack period, where there is still quite a bit of heat and smoke up on the highest levels up on the mountain and over on the mostly north, northeast perimeter,” she said. “Containment might just be slow on this fire. Where the heat is — in really steep, rocky terrain — it’s difficult to get crews into that area. It’s just taking firefighters a lot longer to get to the access points and get to the places where we’re seeing heat up on the top of the mountain there. So it’s probably going to be status quo throughout today and into tomorrow of firefighters just working those heats as we continue to see them pop up.”

She said there is good news about fighting the fire, though.

“Overnight, with the cooler temperatures that we saw, we didn’t see almost any flare-ups overnight that we’ve been seeing the last few shifts,” she said. “The night shift was actually a lot quieter, and we woke up to less smoke this morning than we have the last few mornings.”

Hellstrom also noted that I-84 is now open fully to traffic with the exception of the shoulder around the fire area, which is still being utilized by first responders.

“Both lanes are open, but the shoulder is closed because that is the access point for firefighters to get up the mountain,” she said.

“They are parking their vehicles and working from their vehicles and hiking up in from there, so we’re just asking people to drive very cautiously through the canyon and continue driving.”

She said that there have been instances of distracted driving in the area, especially as aerial firefighting operations have caught the attention of drivers.

Hellstrom said the hope is to quash the hottest remaining area of the fire before the weather turns more favorable for fire again.

“We probably will start seeing the containment increase slowly the next shift or two,” she said. “A lot of it just depends on how much work the firefighters can get done. Some of the concerns will really be that it’s going to start heating up again today and we should see almost 90 degree temperatures later this week, so we’re trying to put out any of those hot spots and get containment around this fire before we start hitting those extreme temperatures again.”

She added that the cause of the Broad Fire remains under investigation at this time.