VALE — A faint smell of smoke permeated the air and orange, smoke-filtered sunlight fell on Vale Elementary School as most of the team that has managed the response to two massive wildfires in eastern Oregon was preparing to leave after two weeks of duty.
“I’m ready to get some sleep and see my family,” said Brett Brown, an operations section chief for the incident command team, sitting in the school courtyard with a giant map of the Durkee and Cow Valley fires taped to the brick wall behind him. But, he said, “we want to make sure the next team is ready to take the fire and be successful.”
Brown and several others who’ve been tackling the fires from their base in Vale stepped away from their work Saturday to describe the bigger picture of the largest wildfire in Oregon.
Brown, a U.S. Forest Service employee, was one of dozens deployed to Vale, a town of about 1,900 near the Idaho border, to fight the Cow Valley fire. That fire, which officials said was ignited July 11 by people, grew into a 133,000-acre conflagration primarily of grassland.
Six days after the Cow Valley fire began in northern Malheur County, a lightning strike near Durkee in neighboring Baker County ignited another fire. That one quickly grew into the largest wildfire in the country at the time. California’s Park fire is now larger than the Durkee fire.
At its peak, the 288,690-acre Durkee fire drew about 600 firefighters, 21 airplanes and three helicopters. It has burned through about 450 square miles, an area roughly the size of Multnomah County, with a perimeter about 170 miles long. About 27% of the fire has been contained.
Why did the Durkee fire spread so far and wide?
The grass grew “abundant and thick” in the spring, Brown said, which was followed by a long stretch of high temperatures and low humidity that dried the grass. It is burning mostly on private grazing land.
“And then you add wind to it,” Brown said. “A lot of Oregon is sort of in prime burning conditions.”
Indeed, the Durkee fire is only one of multiple large fires burning in the state. At least three other Oregon wildfires have expanded beyond 100,000 acres, or just under 160 square miles. Those fires, plus ones burning elsewhere in the country, mean resources for fighting fires are stretched thin.
As operations section chief, Brown fields requests for equipment and crews from fire supervisors on the ground. He has seen first-hand the problems that can result from having insufficient crews.
By the time the Durkee fire started to spread, resources in Oregon and nationally were already short, Brown said. That’s partially why firefighters weren’t able to stop it from spreading farther south in the days immediately after it ignited.
“We can only work so fast with the resources we have,” Brown said. “Which puts us behind. That’s why this footprint is so large.”
As of Saturday, about 500 people were working on the Durkee and Cow Valley fires, Brown said. If supervisors had gotten everyone they sought to fight fires, there would be about 1,000 people on the ground, he said.
But it’s not just a question of resources. Another challenge, Brown said, is that the Durkee fire “hasn’t let up.” While most fires calm down at night because there’s less heat and higher humidity, that’s not the case for the Durkee fire, which has been equally intense day and night, he said.
It has closed Interstate 84 several times and threatened about 45 homes and caused evacuations in Baker and Malheur counties.
Crews eventually did stop the fire from continuing south. That allowed the command post to redirect efforts to the area near the I-84 corridor, where the fire threatened Huntington and other towns.
Once firefighters successfully contained the south and east sides of the fire, crews moved to the northwest, where the fire continues to threaten small communities, like Bridgeport. But the winds are now in the firefighters’ favor, blowing the fire back toward itself, Brown said.
So far, the Durkee fire has resulted in few medical problems for staff, Safety Officer Eric Risdal said. Every morning, Risdal gets on a call with staff from other fires in the region, and everyone talks about medical issues faced by their fire crews.
Other fires have regularly reported heat injuries, including at least one requiring a person to be flown to a hospital, but the Durkee fire crew has, so far, reported only two, Risdal said, and both were minor. Other fires have also reported vehicle accidents, burns — including one where a worker put a gloveless hand on a pump that was too hot — and workers hit by trees.
Friday, rescuers found the wreckage of a plane and body of a pilot flying a small tanker near the Falls fire, north of Burns.
After a grueling 14 days, Brown is ready to go home, even as he helps staff from the incoming incident command team get up to speed.
“It’s a hard balance of being excited to go,” Brown said, “but making sure that things are going to be in order.”
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