Oregon’s historic wildfires: the unprecedented was predictable

The most common description being used for Oregon’s ongoing wildfire cataclysm is “unprecedented.”

That’s certainly the case in modern recorded history when it comes to the sheer number of conflagrations and megafires that erupted starting Labor Day. A powerful windstorm caused fires to race through Oregon’s typically more fire-resistant forests on the west side of the Cascades for 72 hours.

When the damage is eventually tolled, the number of structures lost and evacuees will dwarf any previous total in the history of the state by orders of magnitude. The number of acres burned over just a week is likely to surpass annual statewide totals from even the largest fire seasons of the past. And more tragically, the loss of life, as Gov. Kate Brown warned Wednesday, may be the largest ever experienced.

While last week’s hellfire is unprecedented, it was not unforeseeable.

The unusual “east wind event,” which conspired with existing drought conditions to blow up two low-level fires and other human-caused ignitions last weekend, is rare but not unprecedented, academics and fire experts say. The winds were the main culprit in making the catastrophic infernos as fast moving as they were.

Experts say those east winds are Oregon’s version of the dry, downslope Santa Ana winds that stoke big fires in California. They have long blamed them for some of the largest westside fires in modern Oregon history and say similar wind-driven megafires have shaped the entire ecosystem west of the Cascades over millennia.

Neither the wind event nor the fires were unpredictable. The windstorm and resulting fire danger were forecast days in advance, but with little appreciable effect.

Moreover, scientists have long pointed to the inverse relationship between fire frequency and severity on the west side – that is, fewer fires can mean more intense fires -- and they warn that fire is moving west to the overgrown forests and population centers of the Willamette Valley and southwest Oregon in an age of global warming.

That recognition, however, has spurred little movement beyond the established battle lines that have characterized forestry debate in Oregon for decades. The prospect of widespread forest treatments in the complex ecosystems of the west side – establishing fire breaks and using thinning and prescribed burns to reduce the fuels that choke forest floors – is environmentally unthinkable to some, and impractical to others.

That leaves Oregon facing the paradox of relying on full fire suppression. But leaping on every fire and putting it out immediately is the practice that helped create the problem in the first place.

Alternatively, Oregon can turn to other, easier measures. It could adopt policies requiring more frequent pre-emptive blackouts by utilities so that downed power lines do not spark fires. Or the state could force updated building codes, regulations on defensible space near structures, and incorporating wildfire risk in land-use planning and zoning.

But those policies won’t stop big fires and are contentious, too. And in a legislative session shortened by a Republican walkout over climate change legislation, none of them gained ground. Bills to expand forest treatments across the state, as well as legislation to modernize and bolster the Oregon Department of Forestry’s ability to put down wildfires quickly, went nowhere.

It’s possible that the sheer scale of this week’s tragedy will reframe and accelerate the debate. But if so, the problems will compete with COVID-19 for a strapped state budget, with poor prospects for major new investments.

“We’re sobered right now,” said Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, who chaired the Legislature’s Committee on Wildfire Preparedness. “But in the past we’ve been sobered and I haven’t seen us come together around the causes we have to address.”

East wind events

The strong and persistent windstorm that started Monday and stoked the big fires is unusual, but academics say similar conditions were a prime factor in many of the most infamous, fast-running west-side conflagrations since Europeans settled in Oregon.

Those include the 1902 Yacolt Burn, which torched 500,000 acres in Southwest Washington and parts of Oregon and killed at least 65 people. Easterly gales were a main ingredient in the Tillamook Burn of 1933, which initially burned 40,000 acres west of Gales Creek over 10 days, then devoured an additional 200,000 acres in 20 hours when stoked by hot east winds. East winds were also implicated in the Bandon fire of 1936, which burned 143,000 acres, consumed the town of 1,800 and killed at least 10 people.

Daniel Donato, a natural resource scientist at Washington Department of Natural Resources, is currently studying the relationship between east wind events and large fires. He says there’s ample precedent and it’s fair to say it’s characteristic of the landscape west of the Cascades.

He likens it to the recent awakening around the likelihood of a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake. “We get lulled into this sense that it doesn’t happen here. It’s a California problem. But it does happen here, with low frequency,” he said.

Dan Gavin is a geographer at the University of Oregon who studies the history and pattern of fires in wet forest types west of the Cascade Range. He says the best evidence of pre-European, west-side megafires comes from core samples of remaining old-growth trees in protected areas and tree-ring studies in stumps from 1980s clearcuts. Coupled with sediment studies, they show that big fires have been a constant presence on the landscape for at least 11,000 years, leaving uniformly aged stands of Douglas-fir across Western Oregon and Washington at intervals of 100 to 250 years.

In the hierarchy of factors that dictate how fast and far a fire will burn – fuels, topography and weather – wind speed and direction are key drivers. And since those fires have no obvious ignition source, he says, they were likely either “lightning holdovers” or fires set by indigenous tribes along hunting routes that smoldered for days to weeks before a hot and persistent east wind kicked up, bellowing the fires and preventing the typical nighttime increase in relative humidity that comes with normal westerly marine flows.

That’s what happened Monday. Two fires  – Beachie Creek and Lionshead – had been burning for weeks in steep terrain. By late August, Beachie Creek was small enough that the Department of Forestry reassigned scarce resources to other, higher-priority fires. On Monday night and Tuesday morning, however, high winds pushed down drainages from the crest of the Cascades, gaining temperature as they drove toward the valley floor. Both fires exploded, with Beachie Creek making a spectacular 55-mile run of flame toward the valley. Together, they formed a 313,000-acre behemoth by Friday.

Similar scenarios played out to the north and south.

The idea of human-set fire is also apt.  Most of the fires burning in Western Oregon today were not caused by lightning, which doesn’t occur during the atmospheric conditions in place Monday. Officials have yet to identify the cause for most of the blazes, saying they are under investigation. But with population increases, particularly in what fire experts call the wildland-urban interface, 70 percent of fires in Oregon today are human caused, and earlier this summer, the percentage was 90 percent, according the Oregon Department of Forestry.

Academics are reluctant to attribute any one event to human-caused climate change. But there is broad consensus that climate change is driving higher temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns and drought cycles across the west and in Western Oregon.

“Climate change is loading the dice,” Donato said. “It’s deepening and lengthening summer drought. Loading that one die is part of the west-side fire equation.”

A 2019 report by the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute found that fire risk due to climate change is projected to increase across the state by mid-century, with the largest increases in the Willamette Valley and Eastern Oregon.

Likewise, a 2019 risk assessment by the Governor’s Council on Wildfire Response specifically identified areas of Clackamas, Marion and Lane counties as well as much of Southwest Oregon as areas of high and increasing wildfire risk.

Patrick Bartlein, another University of Oregon geographer whose research includes environmental modeling, says making the connection between a particular wind event and climate change is tricky to do. But ingredients of the atmospheric setup for Monday’s windstorm can be related to global change, he said, including the eastern Pacific Ocean being 5 degrees warmer this summer than the 30-year average, which heats the atmosphere and reinforces the weather pattern that caused it.

“A lot of the components of that event are consistent with human-caused climate change,” he said.

Reacting, now and in the future

If more frequent fire is coming to Western Oregon, it raises the question of what can be done, immediately and in the future.

Authorities and residents in the Santiam Canyon, along the McKenzie River and in Clackamas County were uniformly caught off guard by the freakish speed of the fires' advance, despite clear weather warnings. And some residents said evacuation notices came late, if at all.

The National Weather Service was issuing hazardous fire weather warnings Friday, Sept. 4, calling for warm, dry and windy conditions between the next Monday and Wednesday.

They repeated high fire danger warning Saturday Sept. 5: “It’s going to be quite warm again next week. But the big story is increased fire danger due to strong east winds and a very dry air mass. Fire starts have the potential to be very active and spread quickly.”

The agency’s “urgent fire weather” message for the region came again Sunday, Sept. 6, at 3 p.m.: “HISTORIC SEPTEMBER EAST WIND EVENT LIKELY, PEAKING MONDAY NIGHT AND TUESDAY. EXTREMELY DRY CONDITIONS LIKELY TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY.”

By Monday morning, however, the Marion County Sheriff’s office said on its Facebook page that it was “hearing of rumors spreading in town of a possible evacuation inside the city of Detroit. There are no plans for an evacuation inside the city of Detroit at this time.”

The lake was still open. Tourists were in town. Later that night, there was no warning. The fire was there. Residents fled down Oregon 22 with flames on both sides of road.

“It was frantic,” Detroit Mayor Jim Trett told Oregon Public Broadcasting. "The calls started about midnight to evacuate. We had hadn’t even been declared a Level 1 as of yet, which is just “Listen.” We went from nothing to a Level 3, and in less than 24 hours. But when they called at midnight, we had people in bed, and the way they got told it was just people pounding on their doors saying ‘get out.’"

It was similar story for Michelle Jarvis, who lives south of Estacada in Clackamas County. She said she signed up for emergency notifications on her phone as the Riverside fire loomed in the distance Tuesday morning.

“I don’t remember getting any Level 1 or 2,” she said. “I wondered if they even worked til the officer was coming down my driveway (around 4 p.m.) and telling us to leave. Then I started getting the alert. It happened super-fast.”

It’s also unclear if utilities shut their grids down early enough with pre-emptive blackouts. Electric utilities' role in causing or preventing wildfire has been a hot topic since 2018, when PG&E’s failure to stop the flow of power on a high-voltage line in Northern California caused the Camp fire, which immolated the town of Paradise and killed 84 people. Facing $18 billion in damage claims from the fire, the company filed for bankruptcy last year and ended up pleading guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter.

Oregon Public Utility Commission Chair Megan Decker issued a statement Friday addressing the potential problem.

“Downed power lines can be a source of ignition and will be examined in the formal investigations that are yet to come. At this point the PUC has no information attributing any specific wildfire to any specific Oregon utility. As with every major fire, full investigations will deliver the facts that we need to determine root causes, including information about whether utility lines were a primary ignition source.”

Local utilities have been honing their wildfire preparedness ever since the Camp fire, increasing vegetation management, replacing wooden poles, upgrading grids to react more quickly and communicating with customers about the potential for “public safety power outages.”

With the wind forecast in place Saturday, Sept. 5, Portland General Electric started preparing for its first ever fire prevention blackout for customers on Mount Hood. It warned local officials, then sent out customer notifications the next day. And at 7:15 p.m. on Monday, it pulled the plug, cutting off power for roughly 5,000 customers from Alder Creek to Government Camp.

PacifiCorp, which serves customers up the Santiam Canyon, did not do the same, and there are unconfirmed reports that downed power lines may have exacerbated existing fires in that area.

The utility issued a statement Wednesday, saying it was working with local and state authorities to investigate fire causes, but that pre-emptive blackouts need to meet very specific criteria based on “historical fire behavior, topology, wind speed and directionality, fuel loading, and current local situations like community evacuations.”

“Shutting off power to our service territory in advance of the event could have created more issues for suppression and evacuation efforts,” the statement said.

Two public utilities, Lane Electric Cooperative and Eugene Water and Electric Board, serve customers along the McKenzie River, where fire causes are still under investigation.

The former, which serves the devastated town of Blue River, began to get multiple outage calls Monday evening, possibly because of high winds, and ultimately elected to shut down its lines early Tuesday morning, said Jonathan Farmer, a spokesman. It brought its grid partially back online Tuesday only to shut it down again Tuesday night amid deteriorating conditions.

“We don’t have any idea what that cause was,” he said. “We hope it wasn’t us, but we await results” of an investigation.

EWEB, which serves customers down the valley, from the community of Vida and below, said it was watching the weather but didn’t institute any pre-emptive blackouts. It started seeing spot outages in its service territory along the river Monday night and took several substations and the customers they serve down about 8:30 p.m. By Tuesday morning, it shut off the rest of its McKenzie River substations.

“We’ll learn from this and we’ll probably refine our plans,” said Joe Harwood, a utility spokesman. “Theoretically we could be even more pre-emptive.”

It’s not a popular decision among customers. Even in Northern California, where people have fresh memories of one of the worst utility-caused tragedies in decades, the public outcry over subsequent pre-emptive blackouts by PG&E has been intense, said Matt Donegan, who chaired the Council of Wildfire Response that Gov. Kate Brown set up in Jan. 2019 to address the state’s burgeoning wildfire risks and skyrocketing costs.

Nevertheless, he said he fully expects we’re going to see a lot more of them. “It’s going to be a very common practice, because of climate change, because of the vegetative problems. But I think we’re going to see a lot of public pushback on that.”

And that lack of public consensus is the issue around the most common strategies to deal with wildfire risk.

Take forest thinning and similar measures. The wood products industry and representatives from rural communities are big supporters of this strategy because of the jobs and revenues it would bring.

Meanwhile, Donato and other researchers suggest that treating big portions of the west side forests through thinning, prescribed burns and other fuel reduction efforts is an impractical, Sisyphean task.

The scale of the problem is so vast, Donato said, and the forests so biologically productive, that “even if we somehow miraculously caught up with fuels reduction on the west side, it would grow back in a matter of years. It’s not even relevant to the west side. It doesn’t even need to be a conversation.”

For conservationists, meanwhile, the prospect of meddling in the complex ecosystems of the west side forests is unthinkable. Oregonians value them as they are, aesthetically, as carbon sinks, for clean water, wildlife and recreation. They also suggest that the value of treatments in all but the most vulnerable communities is minimal, because the percentage of wildfires that actually encounter a treatment is extremely low.

Donegan says he’s not sure there’s absolute consensus around that conclusion. But after living through the public debate around one of the council’s chief recommendations, spending $4 billion over 20 years to treat 5.6 million acres of forest and grasslands, he acknowledges that it’s off the table for now, on the west side at least.

“It’s the third rail,” he said.

There was plenty of discussion about competing bills from the governor and Sen. Herman Baertschiger, R-Grants Pass, to beef up and modernize the Department of Forestry’s firefighting capabilities, adding more bodies, buying or leasing new equipment and rejiggering its dysfunctional system for paying its exploding fire costs.

They died too.

It is feasible that Oregonians can agree on some of the wildfire mitigation and adaptation strategies that the council recommended. Among many others, they include updating building codes, increasing enforceable requirements on defensible space, incorporating wildfire risk in land-use planning and zoning.

But those recommendations aren’t universally popular either. Should the requirements apply to  new construction vs. retrofits of existing homes? How to assure low-income communities benefit? Do you adopt penalties for neighbors who don’t comply with defensible space?

The major selling point of the council’s recommendations was that the state can save money, forestland, lives and communities in the long run by making investments and sensible policy changes now.

“I thought the entire council engaged in good critical thinking,” Donegan said. “They were intellectually honest and took off their partisan hats. It was a big tent approach. Then you get to the legislative process and a lot of those more familiar battles lines reemerged. That was obviously very disappointing.”