Category Archives: Wildfire

On Monday morning, September 7, the Beachie Creek Fire had burned 776 acres in the Opal Creek Wilderness of the Willamette National Forest. The fire was in a steep, inaccessible landscape, so the Forest Service had been fighting it mainly by dropping water from helicopters.

Dropping water on the Beachie fire on September 2, when it was supposed to be only 23 acres in size. Click image for a larger view. Forest Service photo.

Monday afternoon saw winds as high as 75 miles per hour blowing burning embers from the fire miles to the west. Over the next ten or so hours, the fire burned an average of three acres per second, growing to 132,450 acres. Residents of Gates, Mill City, and Mehama who had gone to sleep knowing they were comfortably 4 to 7 miles from the fire front were awakened and hastily evacuated in the middle of the night. The now-renamed Santiam Fire destroyed hundreds of homes and killed at least two people. Continue reading →

Last Wednesday afternoon, I watched four large airtankers drop tens of thousands of gallons of fire retardant on the Green Ridge Fire, which is burning within sight of my backyard. The airtankers included two twin-jet MD-87s, a DC-7, and a CV-580.

A DC-7 dumps 3,000 gallons of retardant on an area already painted red with the stuff to try to keep the fire on the left from to the right (south) overnight. Click image for a larger view.

Between them, the four planes were capable of dumping more than 11,000 gallons of retardant, and they each made several passes at the fire. A west wind was pushing most of the fire to the east, but there was also some push to the south. The tankers were painting a wide swath of forest red south of the burning area to try to slow or halt the southerly expansion of the fire. Continue reading →

A thunderstorm Sunday afternoon ignited more than two dozen fires in Central Oregon. Most were quickly suppressed and the largest one still burning is within sight of my backyard, which means we have been treated to a noisy air show of helicopters and MD-87s dumping water or fire retardant on the hillside.

Looking like a tiny insect, a helicopter dumps water on the north side of the Green Ridge fire on Monday. Despite these efforts, the fire appeared to have spread north of this spot on Tuesday. Click image for a larger view.

Due to drought, many fire officials were predicting that wildfires this year would be “severe and complex,” particularly in the West. In fact, according to the National Interagency Coordination Center’s Tuesday morning situation report, only 53 percent as many acres have burned so far this year as the average of the last ten years. Fewer acres have burned so far this year than burned by this same date in 2014, which was the mildest fire year since 2010. Continue reading →

Someone in Bend must be reading this blog, or at least thinking along the same lines. In 2017, after the Wine Country fires had burned homes in Santa Rose, the Antiplanner noted that the problem was the homes were too dense and needed a buffer of low-density homes around them. I made the same point after the Camp Fire burned homes in Paradise.

Now Deschutes County is zoning a buffer between Bend and the national forest for low-density housing. The zone calls for one home every 2.5 acres, which is probably not dense enough — one home every acre would be sufficient and would make it more likely that homeowners would treat their entire properties to minimize fire risk.

The land that Deschutes County is zoning as a fire buffer is outside of Bend’s urban-growth boundary. Under Oregon land-use planning rules, lands outside of but adjacent to the boundary may be zoned “rural residential” with 5- to 10-acre minimum lot sizes. It is likely that the county is going for 2.5-acre lot sizes because it fears it couldn’t get away with one-acre lot sizes. Continue reading →

When the Antiplanner looks at before-and-after aerial photos of the fire in Paradise, California that killed at least 84 people, the first thing I think is that, like last year’s Santa Rosa fire, the houses were built too closely together. This made it impossible, short of building a home exclusively of concrete, to defend homes from fire. Once one house caught on fire, its neighbors would be ignited by the radiant heat of the first.

As described in a Los Angeles Time article, the best way to prevent such “structure to structure ignition” is to build homes at least 100 feet apart. California law in fact requires that homeowners provide a 100-foot perimeter of “defensible space,” but the law doesn’t require that homes be built 100 feet apart. As the Times notes, the “100-foot requirement stops at the property line.”

Unfortunately, urban planners’ mania for density makes it difficult, if not impossible, for California developers to lay out homesites on one-acre lots, which would insure at least 100 feet between homes. While I don’t know the situation in Paradise, population data indicate that much of the growth of the city has been since 1970, when many California cities and counties began limiting low-density development. Continue reading →

It’s the height of summer, which means the Antiplanner is thinking about hiking in nearby national forests before they get filled with smoke from wildfires. This year has already seen 3.4 million acres burn, mostly in the South and the Rocky Mountains. That’s slightly more than average, but big fires in the Pacific Coast states have yet to come.

A friend of mine forwarded to me a copy of a letter from a retired logger to his Congressional delegation criticizing the Forest Service and other federal land agencies for their firefighting tactics. He remembers when firefighters engaged in “direct attack,” meaning they drove or hiked to the edge of the fire, built a fire line (which means removing all vegetation from an area that is at least several feet wide), and then worked to keep the fire from crossing that line. Firefighters still build firelines today, but, he observes, they typically do it “miles (in places 10 or more) from the actual fire.”

That has been my observation as well, and I believe the change came about as a result of Colorado’s South Canyon Fire, in which fourteen firefighters who were engaged in direct attack were killed in what is known as a “burnover.” Basically, the fire jumped across the firelines and surrounded them. Continue reading →

News that a prescribed fire in Florida escaped control and burned 36 homes reminds me of a fire the Forest Service lit ten weeks ago near my home in central Oregon. To create a fuel break, the fire was set across a county road from the community of homes that forms the denser part of Camp Sherman.

Click on any image for a larger view.

Western forests are different from those in Florida, whose long growing seasons allow the rapid accumulation of flammable materials. The typical forest forest around Camp Sherman is ponderosa pine over knee-high (with some waist-high) shrubs, often with a few ponderosa pine seedlings in the mix. It takes many decades for enough fuels to collect to make these forests susceptible to major fires; according to a Forest Service report, less than 15 percent of national forests are of a type that needs frequent light fires (described as “historical fire regime I” in the report) and have had their vegetation significantly altered by management (“condition class 3”). Continue reading →

Amazingly, a large wildfire is still burning in California as the year nears its end. Supposedly the largest California wildfire in recorded history, the Thomas fire has burned nearly 300,000 acres and more than 1,000 homes and other structures.

A firefighter looks at the Thomas Fire on Christmas day.

While the Thomas fire is not quite 100 percent contained, any additional acres it burns will not much change the year’s total of 9.6 million acres burned, which is almost 50 percent more than the previous ten-year average of 6.5 million acres. The extent of burning in California (more than 1.2 million acres) and the Pacific Northwest (more than 1.0 million acres) fueled controversies over public land management in general. Continue reading →

If you live in a fire-prone area, which includes most of California, it is not a good idea to allow ivy and other plants to cover the sides of your building, as this winery and this church did near Santa Rosa. Both were lost to last week’s wildfires.

Similarly, if you are a legislator in a fire-prone state, it is not a good idea to outlaw fire-resistant developments. As now-retired Forest Service researcher Jack Cohen relates in the above video, one requirement for making your home fire-safe is to have no large flammable structures within 100 feet of the home. That pretty much means people should build on one-acre or larger lots. Continue reading →