On a recent sunny, dry Sunday afternoon between downtown Haines and the airport, a column of smoke rising from a brush-filled hillside below Craig and Sheri Loomis’ home.
The smoke caught the attention of a firefighter driving into town.
He reported it, and within an hour, tensions boiled over into a chaotic scene involving more than a dozen volunteer firefighters, three fire trucks and the Loomises. An altercation ensued over whether it truly was an out-of-control blaze during a particularly dangerous time to be burning, or a controlled burn in a wet environment that the family didn’t need help corralling at all.
When the smoke cleared, Haines Borough Assembly member Craig Loomis was soaked with a truck-mounted firehose, and he sprayed a volunteer firefighter in the face with his water hose.
As a result, Loomis is charged with a class A misdemeanor for refusing to obey the order of a fire official. If convicted, he faces up to a year in jail and up to $1,000 in fines.
A history of burning
Craig Loomis said he’s been burning brush on the hillside below their home each spring since the 1980s. The family lives on a steep part of an 80-plus acre homestead at about 2.5 mile of the Haines Highway
“I do this all the time,” he said. “I went there, found a level spot, and burned last year too.”
Loomis said he wanted to clear the brush and get rid of a large stump jutting out of the hillside. It was a project he said he’d only do this time of year because their property has a lot of water on it.
“If you dropped napalm, it still wouldn’t burn,” Craig said, pointing out a piece of wood he’d pulled out of the ground recently that still had ice crystals on it.
This year, Loomis got a permit to burn on a piece of land he owns across the highway from his home. Burn permits are required for all open burning activity in the borough. That area was inspected twice and approved for a burn.
But, when he first called emergency dispatch about noon March 30, it was to inform them of his plans to burn right below his house in a different place.
According to borough policy, a fire 10 feet or smaller in diameter and 4 feet or smaller in height can be approved without a site inspection. Still, anyone who wants to burn is supposed to call the fire department.
Loomis had some confusion about the precise terms of the burn permit, but said he told dispatchers he had no intention of building the fire to 10 feet high.
“I told them it would be a controlled burn,” he said.
He said it took about a half-hour to start the fire, Which he attributes to how wet the ground underneath the brush was. He said he kept having to pile dry brush on it to get a heated base where he wanted to burn.
“I had to literally use a little bit of oil with a little bit of old gasoline to get it to go,” he said.
Once he got it going, Loomis said the fire worked its way up the hill, occasionally catching surrounding grass on fire and catching pockets of things like a pile of dogwood that he cut down last year. But he said he monitored it with a garden hose and saw no danger.
“I was throwing sticks for the dog, standing on the stump myself, he said. “I was stepping over the flames.”
He said there was a lot of charred grass and smoldering brush, but that most of it had gone out by the time firefighters arrived.
“If I had known this was going to be this big a deal, I’d have just dumped water on it myself,” he said.
A tense encounter
Police and fire department staff paint a different picture of what happened that day. According to charging documents, Craig Loomis is alleged to have described the burn as being the size of a campfire.
Firefighter Sean Reed, driving into town, saw the burn and called dispatch about 3:18 p.m., reporting a brush fire.
Loomis heard the sirens and called dispatchers again, this time to tell them that he had it under control and that it was not necessary to send firefighters.
Multiple people described seeing several spot fires on the hillside and open flames.
Fire chief Brian Clay said when he arrived, Craig and Sheri Loomis were already yelling at first responders – a fact the Loomises don’t dispute.
Craig Loomis said he was angry that firefighters assumed he didn’t have control of a fire he started on his own property – particularly one that had taken him so long to get going.
“He was hollering and screaming ‘Don’t put the fire out,’” Clay said.
Clay said he walked up and around the hillside and watched the fire creep across the ground. He described it as an illegal burn because it was too big and the ground hadn’t been cleared down to mineral soil.
“I would never have approved burning that on that hillside like that,” said Clay, who directed the fire department to put it out.
While firefighters prepared to douse the hillside, Loomis worked to put the fire out with his garden hose. Clay said he told Loomis to get off the fire scene and that fire department members would put it out themselves.
Several minutes passed between when firefighters arrived and when they were given the order to start extinguishing the hillside and sometime during that initial delay, assistant fire chief Tim Holm arrived.
According to a statement he later gave to Haines police, Holm described assessing the fire area and deciding that due to the wind, vegetation and other flammable material in the area, the fire was a risk for all nearby homes and hillside properties.
He, too, directed firefighters to attempt to contain the fire.
Holm wrote that he also told Craig Loomis to leave the area for the safety of the firefighters and because his presence in the area was complicating the firefighters’ response.
“During this time he was inadvertently sprayed with water from engine 2’s deck gun,” Holm wrote.
Craig Loomis agrees that he got sprayed. But he assumed a firefighter had sprayed him.
“I was standing on the stump and this guy drags the hose up there and he’s about 15 feet away from the stump, and he starts spraying,” Loomis said. “I’m standing on the stump. All of a sudden, he just turned the pressure up and sprays me and I looked right at him and I said ‘Oh, you want to play games, huh?”
Then Loomis turned his garden hose on that firefighter.
Multiple people, including the firefighter who got sprayed, Nathanael Motes, laughed when they described this as a sustained 20-30 seconds of spraying, during which another firefighter came along and put down Motes’ mask to protect his face.
Motes said he didn’t spray Loomis with the fire hose he was carrying and was focused on putting out a fire on the stump. And, he said, while he didn’t feel like his life was in danger, he did feel threatened.
“I definitely felt like he was purposefully attacking me,” Motes said, particularly because Craig Loomis had been yelling at and berating firefighters since they arrived.
Motes said he has put the incident behind him, but a good resolution to the incident would be an apology.
“Him saying, ‘I was a d*** and I’m sorry, I was out of control, it was a heated situation,’” Motes said. “Maybe not like an apology to myself, but an apology to the whole team and the Haines Volunteer Fire Department because me getting sprayed with the hose is just one thing. He told one of the other guys some threatening stuff, too.”
Those threats are referenced in charging documents for misdemeanor filed against Loomis.
Police officer Travis Russell described recording Loomis stepping back from the edge of the driveway at one point, pointing at each firefighter working to contain the fire on the hillside and saying “I know one thing, if my dad were down here, guess what? There would be one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight f****** dead people.”
Craig Loomis said that he does not mean this statement – which he has used publicly in the past – as a threat.
“I wouldn’t shoot anybody unless I felt like my life was in danger,” he said.
He said he means that people are trespassing and have no right to do so, and that if it had been his father – a WWII veteran – the situation likely would have gotten violent.
“But I’m not my dad,” he said.
Getting political
In another recorded incident from the day, Sheri Loomis said during all of the chaos and yelling, she heard assistant chief Holm yelling expletives at her husband. So she drove down her driveway and parked along the Haines Highway to go find out what he was doing.
In a written statement to the police, Holm said Sheri Loomis came out of the vehicle yelling at him and recording him.
“I did feel assaulted, targeted by her aggression, and as if her state of mind was irrational enough to harm me or other responders,” he wrote.
Holm wrote that he does not remember exactly what he said to her.
In a video shared by Sheri Loomis, the two of them are screaming at each other about the size, scope and legality of the fire.
“I’ll go to the assembly. I’m going to get him thrown out,” Holm said, referring to Craig Loomis.
Sheri Loomis yelled back “Don’t you threaten. You’re getting him thrown out of the assembly, are you kidding me?”
In the video, officer Russell tried to de-escalate the situation. Sheri Loomis said she wanted Holm to leave the property, threatening to sue if he isn’t removed immediately.
That threat of getting her husband removed from the assembly has become a focal point for Sheri Loomis’s frustration about the whole event.
“Craig is not an assemblyman when he’s working on a Sunday on our own property burning brush, I don’t care what anybody says,” she said.
Sheri Loomis described deputy chief Holm’s behavior as threatening and said she downloaded paperwork and filed a no-trespass order against him the day after the fire.
“This is our safe haven and somebody came in and violated that,” she said. “I didn’t feel safe.”
Craig Loomis served Holm with the no-trespass order personally at the fire station. Sheri said in later conversations with police they were told that while the order has been received and Holm has been told he has to stay off of their property, if there’s a fire call on their property he could still respond.
She also filed a public records request with the borough asking for documentation of the timeline of the day’s events and seeking the bylaws of the fire department addressing discipline of employees and volunteers. She wants to know what — if any actions — the fire department will take in disciplining or reprimanding Holm for his behavior on the scene, according to the request.
Craig Loomis isn’t so sure that he’s being politically targeted, but he said he does have an evolving understanding of what it means to be a public official — particularly when it comes to how he responds to people when he loses his temper.
In late January, he got into a dispute with another assembly member, Mark Smith, that devolved into him shouting obscenities at Smith in the parking lot of the building.
“My personal view is now, I was wrong,” he said. “It’s embarrassing to me now.”
Loomis said he’s done burning brush and intends to keep his head down until he’s off the assembly next year and can go back to being a private citizen.
He is due in court in Haines on April 30.
Correction: This story has been updated to show that while Craig Loomis was initially facing two borough citations in addition to a misdemeanor charge, those citations were rejected by the state court system and Haines police report they will not be pursuing those charges again.