SAGLE — The third installment of a multi-agency wildland fire event added a new wrinkle — red tape.

A new layer of complexity is typically thrown in every year the collaborative exercise and this year’s featured bureaucracy.

The scenario which played out last month at Saddle Ridge Estates in Sagle involved a wind-whipped fire that laid waste to more than 4,000 acres and could not be quickly bridled.

After the first day in which as many as nine homes without defensible spaces were destroyed and an impatient journalist was killed after venturing into the scene just as the fire blew up, fire officials spent the second day with elected officials and government agencies to identify funding to sustain fire-fighting efforts.

“That was the next logical step — bring in the elected officials and begin the discussion,” said Sagle Fire District Chief Rob Goodyear, one of the exercise’s main architects.

The table-top exercise involved Bonner County commissioners, Bonner County Emergency Management and the Idaho Bureau of Homeland Security, and the acquisition of fire management assistance grants.

“It’s bureaucracy, but it has to be gone through,” Goodyear said.

Participating fire districts included Sagle, Schweitzer, Timberlake, North of the Narrows, Sam Owen and South Boundary County. The Sandpoint and Clark Fork fire departments took part, as did the U.S. Forest Service, the Idaho Department of Lands and Bonner County EMS.

“We need to continue to have these training exercises and build upon what we’ve learned so that when this does happen, we don’t fall on our faces,” said Goodyear.