Monument Fire demands coverage
Above, flames from the Monument Fire can be seen from the command post set up along Highway 92 at Yaqui Street
Photo by Melissa Marshall HERALD/REVIEW
A fire that started south of Sierra Vista at the Coronado Memorial near the Mexican border, quickly turned into a disaster for a rural area near Sierra Vista as high winds whipped the Monument Fire from canyon to canyon in the Huachuca Mountains.
The blaze, fanned for three days by up to 50 mph wind gusts, doubled in size in just one day and as of this writing has charred 29,065 acres.
As the fire raged in the sparsely populated mountains, it eventually rolled down the slopes and jumped a major highway that connects Sierra Vista to the Hereford and Bisbee communities.
Employees of the Herald/Review scrambled to ramp up coverage that included nearly 24/7 website updates, extra pages of color photography in the newspaper and a plentiful helping of local stories as crews from around the nation arrived to help fight the blaze.
At its height there were 1,176 people assigned to the fire, including 26 crews, 86 engines, 7 helicopters, 1 single-engine air tanker, 2 heavy air tankers, and 2 dozers. Employees and their friends were impacted by the fire as housing areas were put under mandatory evacuation. Seven days after the blaze, at least one employee had not gone home. Earlier in the week another employee went home, but to a house with no electricity.
Luckily, no loss of life has occurred and the fire is at about 60 percent containment as of June 23.
The newspaper’s single copy sales increased by about 25 percent at the height of the fire and our web site traffic went up nearly ten fold above normal.
We saw four consecutive days of 100,000-plus page views including a record day of 168,000-plus views and 51,000 visits as the fire hit more populated areas just south of town. People from around the world were logging time on the site to follow our coverage which readers hailed as the most “accurate” of several sites that were devoted to fire coverage.
Our average time on site climbed to 5 minutes and 51 seconds average for the seven day period, in large part due to our continuing interactive efforts including live chat and streaming video from community meetings.
For the month of June to date (June 23) we have surpassed 1.4 million page views and 466,000 visits.
In comparison, during the month of May, we did 537,000 main server page views on 177,208 visits.
We also generated 2,700 more "Likes" on Facebook, and had another 477,235 Post Views with 1,274 post feedbacks as well.