Pole Creek Fire Update 9-29-2012

Pole Creek Update

Thank you for nice comments on our “reporting”.  I did feel rather like Lois Lane as we contemplated hopping the fence and dashing across the field to get closer … “C’mon, Jimmy, we gotta get the story!”

The worst days of the fire are over.  It’s at 25,553 acres, 1100 firefighters, 50% containment.  But what followed the big flames were the worst days for Sisters.  An inversion settled the smoke in a seemingly solid mass directly on the town.

Here it comes . . .

 

 



Here it is.

 

 

They recalibrated the pollution monitoring equipment to allow measurements in an environment where you can actually see the air you are going to breath swirling around you.  Ordinarily the equipment would measure particulates of 250 parts per cubic meter as a reading of “hazardous”.  The air in Sisters read 1183 parts – sort of quad+ hazardous?

The towns people, however, were astonishingly blasé about it.  “Sisters is Open for Business” read the headlines in the paper.  Just above the story on the pollution levels was a photo of schoolchildren waiting outside for the bus.  Really?  People were out and about wiping their stinging eyes on their way to the store.  (How did we know this?  Well, we were out wiping our eyes on our way to the store – we never claimed to be especially smart.)

Actually, I found the people of Sisters and Bend to be blasé in general.  They seemed to accept the fact that there were 1150 firefighters there risking their health, safety and sometimes lives to protect them as their due with no great need for gratitude.  Ten years ago during the Black Butte fire when there were 100 firefighters sleeping in the park, I tried to organize a cookie bake as a way to express our appreciation.  I called every church in Sisters with no luck at all.  They seemed to think it a bit odd – “Oh, no, we don’t really do that kind of thing.”

Unfortunately, there has been little improvement.  I was dismayed at church on Sunday, after the first week that the fire had been really raging, when the service ended without a single mention of the fire, let alone a prayer for the safety of the 1100+ firefighters.  The topic of the sermon that morning?  How to behave as a Christian.  The pastor’s face dropped with chagrin when I told him I thought something was missing that morning.

It’s always a teeny bit possible that I am wrong.  I hope so.  Anyway, we can’t breathe here, so we are off.

Ash rained down continuously on our car hood and everything else

View out our front window mid-afternoon

You needed your lights on all day

But it did make for some pretty sunsets in brief clear moments.

Wildfire! 9-15-2012

Wildfire!

I’m interrupting the Yellowstone series as I thought this would be of interest now and not so much in mid-winter.

So, this is current – written September 15^th.  We are in Sisters, Oregon.  It’s a picturesque town of 2,083 souls in the beautiful high desert of central Oregon.  I was here 10 years ago, loved it and have been waiting for a chance to return.  One look and Bob loved it here also, so plans to trek on to Trinidad were scrapped.  Trinidad, California is the town we loved last year.  Just fickle, I guess.

I learned about fire in the high desert last time I was here.  2002 was the year of the Cache Mountain fire, the last really big fire year in Sisters.  Of course, all of us in town then knew there was wildfire nearby and moving towards Black Butte Ranch.  BBR, as it’s known here, is a private community of expensive vacation homes situated amid huge ponderosa pine around a golf course.   For days we had been watching the planes dropping their loads of orange fire retardant and helicopters making trips back and forth with swinging buckets of water.  Aside from that, things were pretty normal in town – until the fire jumped the road and got into the ranch.  We all knew that exact moment.  Sirens in the distance, then louder and suddenly every fire truck from every town within 50 miles was screaming one after the other, through town and out towards Black Butte.  That night the trucks were all parked in the streets near the fire house and the firefighters set up a make-shift camp across the street in the park.

10 years later a lot of things have changed.  Bob and I are here in our motorhome staying in a park just outside of Sisters.  I had made a trip to Los Angeles to see children and grandchildren, so I was pretty far away when Bob called last Sunday.  He had been at church in nearby Bend (25 miles away) on a beautiful clear morning.  As he came out of church, he saw a plume, a pure white plume in the blue sky.  It was growing visibly as he drove.  Can’t be Sisters, he thought.  But it was and it was close and it was bad.

The Pole Creek Fire

White smoke means a hot fire.  Later, we learned that this fire started in a “perfect storm”.  The forest is tinder dry.  Walking through it, you can see puffs of dust around your feet.  The duff on the ground – sticks and dead brush – crumble in your fingers.   And there is so much deadwood in the forest from the years since the destructive mountain pine beetle first appeared there.  It seemed that seven of every 10 trees were dead.  And it was hot.  A cold front carrying a trough of wind came through Saturday night.  The fire experts here said they knew all the elements were there.  All that was needed was a spark.  And Sunday morning, near Pole Creek, there was a spark.  Not from lightening, but maybe from one of the campers in the area.  No one has been injured, but many were evacuated, and in the wilderness area, four cars were incinerated.  (This preceding intelligence was obtained by Bob in an interview of a senior fire official at the Three Creeks Brewery.  Good work, Bob.)

There were ominous clouds over the park and ash was falling everywhere.

Bob began packing up the motorhome, but the people in the park assured him that it was safe to stay.  A sprinkler system ringed the park and firefighters were on their way.  And were they ever!  They are “bivouacked” in the Sisters rodeo arena right next to us.  Seemingly overnight, a city has sprung up.

There are now 850 as of this morning.  Wow.  That’s 850 people added to a town of 2,083!  It looks deserted during the day, but at dusk they begin rolling in and the line seems endless – trucks, vans, buses, and huge water trucks – 25, 30, or ?.  And bulldozers and other road building equipment, a propane truck and trucks that we can’t begin to name -- all the work vehicles, plus everything needed to care for all these firefighters.  The sea of tents and trailers goes from one side to the other of the grass parking area that serves the rodeo once a year.  The command center is at the forestry office in town and there is one advance fire camp closer in, but all else is here.   It boggles the mind!  It is a little war they are fighting out here at the drop of a hat.   A bit different from the Black Butte fire I saw 10 years ago.

There are information officers at many points in town with maps to keep the townspeople informed.   As of today, 12,000 acres have burned.  It will continue to burn up North Sisters Mountain until it runs out of fuel and dies on its own.  That is the best case scenario.  The cost of this fire is from a half million to a million dollars a day and that will hold only if no further personnel are needed and they don’t call the planes back.   They flew all night the first night, but then were called to the Wenatchee fire in Washington that threatened the town.

We went out last night.  Of course, the last thing they need is a couple tourists to rescue, so access to areas close to the fire are tightly controlled.  But the red glow on the horizon is easily visible from the road and Bob was able to get these stunning pictures.

While we were out, rain drops began to fall, a puzzle as no rain was forecast at all.  I checked the weather map on my phone and the only rain was in a tight circle around Sisters.  Then lightening began to flash.  I suspected what was going on, but did not find out until this morning that the smoke plume was causing this.  It has now reached 28,000 feet and is capable of producing its own weather.  So, now lightening .  Several small fires were started by it and have to be dealt with now.

- Pole Creek Fire’s 28,000 ft. plume shot from 25 miles away -

No one is making predictions anymore about when this is likely to end.