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Scary update from Oregon live this morning:

Crews try to cut legs out from under monster blaze

07/31/02, ALEX PULASKI and BETH QUINN

CAVE JUNCTION -- As two Southern Oregon fires marched toward each other Tuesday and a third threatened to join them, firefighting crews and heavy-equipment operators struggled to seal off populated areas from their advance.

Fire officials put all 17,000 residents in the Illinois Valley on a 30-minute evacuation notice Tuesday night, meaning every household should be packed and ready to leave if the wind shifts and sends the fire into to the valley.

"Our intent is to stop this fire, but you need to understand that there is a chance this will not work," Greg Gilpin, incident commander for the Oregon Department of Forestry, told about 500 people at a community meeting in Cave Junction on Tuesday night. "Every citizen in the Illinois Valley needs to think about leaving the valley."

Terry Haines, emergency services director for the Rogue Valley chapter of the American Red Cross, said the potential disaster was more frightening than anything he'd seen.

"When you're talking about losing an entire valley, 17,000 homes, when the southern escape route is closed and there's only one way out of here, when you're looking at a 30-foot wall of fire that no one's been able to stop, you're talking about divine intervention here," Haines said.

Although U.S. 199 has been closed by a fire in Northern California, state officials there have agreed to open it if an evacuation is ordered in Oregon, according to the Josephine County sheriff's office.

Sheriff's deputies drove four routes leading out of the valley Monday and uncovered a potentially serious glitch in the evacuation plan.

Deputies found road crews ready to narrow traffic to one lane on U.S. 199 between Selma and Grants Pass, the main highway leading north. Another crew was putting tar and gravel on the road from Upper Deer Creek to Williamson, which would have slowed traffic to a crawl. Both projects have been put on hold until the fire emergency is over.

Ringed by 5,000-foot mountains and thousands of square miles of timbered national forest and threaded with rivers and creeks, the Illinois Valley is an inland island with only four exits.

"I wanted my own people to confirm that those were open," said Lt. Lee Harmon of the Josephine County sheriff's department, whose job is to oversee the traffic flowing out.

The Florence fire doubled in size to 141,650 acres overnight; Sour Biscuit increased by 9,000 acres to 33,287 acres. To the south, near Gasquet in Northern California, the Shelly Creek fire had spread to several hundred acres.

Gilpin said the Florence fire is headed north and was about six miles from Agness. He said it could reach the tiny historic community on the Rogue River within 24 hours.

Mike Lohrey, who will officially take over command of the fire this morning, said crews are working to seal off communities from potential fire advances with bulldozer cuts and back burns.

"A lot of smoke in the air (will be) the smoke we're going to be making," Lohrey said.

Although crews have established what they think is a secure anchor point northwest of Selma, officials warned that if the fire took off it could begin spot fires two miles ahead of its plume, jumping fire lines and forcing evacuations.

"If it looks like it will threaten particular zones we will evacuate them and not the whole valley," said Jim Wolf, an Oregon Department of Forestry fire prevention planner. Glenn Joki, incident commander on the Florence fire, and others said they had rarely seen the sort of "advanced extreme" fire behavior exhibited during the weekend.

But an inversion layer, fairly mild winds and temperatures in the mid-90s have caused the fire to settle down a bit, at least temporarily, Joki said.

Besides the fire lines and burns being conducted on the fires' eastern flank, Anderson said, California crews were cutting line to the south, the primary direction the fires have moved.

Pat Velasco, fire behavior analyst on the Florence blaze, cautioned crews in a morning written briefing about the flames' unpredictability. "Yesterday was a 'forgiving' day, don't get complacent," he wrote. "The fire monster will soon revive; you will again see Dangerous Aggressive Burning conditions."

Also Tuesday morning, Lt. Brian Anderson's crew at the Josephine County emergency operations center at the courthouse in Grants Pass was staffing the phones on behalf of the Illinois Valley's livestock.

"The phone calls are coming in -- it's almost like a Jerry Lewis telethon down here," Anderson said. "We're getting a lot of phone calls about moving horses and llamas and pigs and chickens. We're trying to marry that information with people offering to help. I think actually we're up over 120 people who've volunteered to take in people and animals."

Gary Brummett, owner of the Deer Creek Ranch, said one of the animals evacuated Tuesday was Tye, a 40-year-old horse ridden by John Wayne in the 1975 movie "Rooster Cogburn," which was made in the Rogue Valley.

On Sunday, the Oregon Department of Forestry and the Josephine County Fire Defense Board mapped out 10 evacuation zones.

Since then, most homes near Selma have been visited twice. First, by deputies or volunteers who went door to door with an evacuation notice. Later, crews of city firefighters, who came from throughout Southern Oregon, went door to door to determine which homes could be defended. At driveway entrances along U.S. 199, firefighters tied yellow, green or red ribbons to signal their evaluation of whether the house could be defended.

Evacuations are voluntary -- not even the county sheriff can order residents to leave their homes.

If an evacuation is called, residents will be notified by door-to-door contact, by trucks equipped with loudspeakers and by local radio stations.

The South Middle School shelter in Grants Pass will hold 250 evacuees, and three more shelters in the city are prepared to open at a moment's notice should a large-scale evacuation be ordered. Each will offer cots, blankets and three meals a day to those forced by fire to leave their homes.

Forty-eight people spent Monday night at the shelter, and 78 others have stopped by to register with shelter officials in case distant family and friends call in to find out if their loved ones are safe. Bryan Denson and Erin Hoover Barnett of The Oregonian contributed to this report.