30-mile fire front menaces southwest Oregon towns

Oregon Live ^ | 7/30/02 | Beth Quinn

[Grampa Dave]

30-mile fire front menaces southwest Oregon towns

07/30/02

BETH QUINN

CAVE JUNCTION -- Wildland firefighters battled to keep a 30-mile-long wall of fire from reaching the Illinois Valley on Monday where 17,000 people were warned to get ready to flee.

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As the 70,000 acre Florence fire roared south toward the 20,000-acre Sour Biscuit blaze, firefighters dug a last-ditch fire line stretching along the western edge of the valley and southwestern Oregon communities.

Sixteen bulldozers worked the line on the steep ridges west of Woodrat, Tennessee and Eight Dollar mountains while 14 more wait along U.S. 199 in Selma, awaiting orders to join the fire fight.

Firefighters are preparing to set a 34,000-acre backfire that would be larger than most of the other fires being fought in Oregon.

"We are running dozers 24 hours a day," said Rick Hartigan of the Arizona Central West Zone Incident Management Team overseeing the firefighting.

If the fire hits the bulldozed line, they'll bombard it with fire retardant and water, but even with all that, fire officials told residents Sunday night, they weren't confident they could stop it.

"There is a very good chance that this fire is going to reach the valley floor," said Greg Gilpin, an incident commander for Oregon Department of Forestry. "It is so big and so awesome there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop this fire."

Fire officials warned area residents that the fire could reach the floor of the Illinois Valley today in a third straight day of extreme fire behavior.

Throughout the weekend and into Monday, the head of the Florence fire advanced a mile an hour with 150-foot flames and wind gusts up to 40 mph that threw spot fires up to two miles ahead. Three times the fire built plumes 30,000 feet tall and three times those plumes collapsed back into the fire with explosive force, further spreading the blaze.

"We have veteran firefighters who have never seen such fire behavior," said Hartigan.

"The forestry people all have their eyes rolled back," said Tim Birr of the Oregon Fire Marshal's overhead team. "This fire is kind of like the proverbial 5,000-pound gorilla that goes wherever it wants to go."

On the floor of the mountain-ringed Illinois Valley, firefighters went door-to-door on U.S. 199 from Selma to Kerby. At each spot the firefighters took a location fix with a global positioning system to add each building to the maps used for fire planning.

In addition, the structure firefighters assessed the defensibility of each house, noting which had fireproof roofs and brush-free zones that could be defended against fire and which were overgrown with trees and shrubbery and might be impossible to save.

"In cases where a home can be made more defensible, if they can take some simple steps, they will do it," said Birr.

But even homes that are well-prepared can fall victims to the flames, as two homeowners in Oak Flat learned Sunday. All 12 homes along the Illinois River had been singed on Thursday but survived, yet when the fire moved back through the area Sunday, two homes burned. Another home was lost at McCaleb Ranch along with eight outbuildings.

"There's higher percentage of nondefensible homes," said Kyle Kirchner, chief of the Illinois Valley Fire District and Josephine County Fire Defense Board. Homeowners are "interested now in getting defensible space, and it's too late."

Fire officials began making contingency plans for safety zones where firefighters and residents could find shelter should evacuation routes be cut.

Two of the four routes out of the valley to the south have already been cut off by other fires in Northern California. The only exits are north on U.S.199 to Grants Pass and by a remote forest road from Upper Deer Creek near Selma over the 5,000-foot crest of the Siskiyou Mountains to Williams.

"If it comes across through Selma and compromises that artery, we are preparing to shelter in place," said Kirchner. "We can now see the fire from Selma. As far as I'm concerned, it's imminent."

Fire shelters were being set up at the closed Selma School in Selma and the Illinois Valley High School in Cave Junction, both buildings made of materials designed to withstand fires that sit amidst several acres of cleared, defensible space. A third fire shelter planned for O'Brien had not been designated by early Monday evening.

With bulldozers working feverishly on smoke-shrouded ridges to build the last-ditch line to protect the communities under his care, Kirchner's thoughts turn to a new set of nightmare scenarios should the last-ditch line fail to hold the Florence fire.

"If it goes, now we're worried about the caves," he said, referring to the Oregon Caves National Monument 16 miles east of Cave Junction. "There's enough volatile dry fuel that we're going to have problems."

The fire is also moving northwest. Fire officials projected the blaze could reach homes outside Agness by Wednesday. It would have to jump the Rogue River to burn the town itself, but the fire, fueled by strong winds, has jumped the Illinois River several times, said Pam Leschak, Florence fire information officer.

A structure protection team was already assessing homes and removing brush and trees from around structures south of the Rogue River near Agness on Monday.

An 80-acre blaze closed a section of U.S. 199 near the Oregon/California border Monday. The Shelly Creek fire, burning up the steep canyon walls, was causing boulders and logs to fall onto the road, said Carol McCall, spokeswoman, Redwood National State Parks.

The fire also forced the evacuation of Patrick Creek Lodge, Patrick Campground, Bar-O-Boys Ranch, and a few houses near Gasquet, 20 miles northeast of Crescent City, Calif., in the Smith River Canyon. You can reach Beth Quinn at 541-474-5926 or by e-mail at bquinn@terragon.com.

[Grampa Dave]

Here is a graphic from the Sacramento Bee about the increase fires in the SW during the 1990's. Just more data re the fires and their sizes re connected to the Druid agendas:

[lobo59]

This is from an alert I recieved awhile back.



The Fire This Time

Wall Street Journal

June 21, 2002

In December 1995, a storm hit the Six Rivers National Forest in northern California, tossing dead trees across 35,000 acres and creating dangerous fire conditions. For three years local U.S. Forest Service officials labored to clean it up, but they were blocked by environmental groups and federal policy. In 1999 the time bomb blew: A fire roared over the untreated land and 90,000 more acres.



Bear this anecdote in mind as you watch the 135,000-acre Hayman fire now roasting close to Denver. And bear it in mind rest of this summer, in what could be the biggest marshmallow-toasting season in half a century. Because despite the Sierra Club spin, catastrophic fires like the Hayman are not inevitable, or good. They stem from bad forest management -- which found a happy home in the Clinton Administration.



In a briefing to Congress last week, U.S. Forest chief Dale Bosworth finally sorted the forest from the tree-huggers. He said that if proper forest-management had been implemented 10 years ago, and if the agency weren't in the grip of "analysis paralysis" from environmental regulation and lawsuits, the Hayman fire wouldn't be raging like an inferno.



Mr. Bosworth also presented Congress with a sobering report on our national forests. Of the 192 million acres the Forest Service administers, 73 million are at risk from severe fire. Tens of millions of acres are dying from insects and diseases. Thousands of miles of roads, critical to fighting fires, are unusable. Those facts back up a General Accounting Office report, which estimates that one in three forest acres is dead or dying. So much for the green mantra of "healthy ecosystems."



How did one of America's great resources come to such a pass? Look no further than the greens who trouped into power with the last Administration. Senior officials adopted an untested philosophy known as "ecosystem management," a bourgeois bohemian plan to return forests to their "natural" state. The Clintonites cut back timber harvesting by 80% and used laws and lawsuits to put swathes of land off-limits to commercial use.



We now see the results. Millions of acres are choked with dead wood, infected trees and underbrush. Many areas have more than 400 tons of dry fuel per acre -- 10 times the manageable level. This is tinder that turns small fires into infernos, outrunning fire control and killing every fuzzy endangered animal in sight. In 2000 alone fires destroyed 8.4 million acres, the worst fire year since the 1950s. Some 800 structures were destroyed -- many as a fire swept across Los Alamos, New Mexico -- and control and recovery costs neared $3 billion. The Forest Service's entire budget is $4.9 billion.



That number, too, is important. Before the Clinton Administration limited timber sales, U.S. forests helped pay for their own upkeep. Selective logging cleaned up grounds and paid for staff, forestry stations, cleanup and roads. Today, with green groups blocking timber sales at every turn, the GAO says taxpayers will have to spend $12 billion to cart off dead wood.



It's no accident that two of the main Clinton culprits -- former director of Fish & Wildlife Jamie Rappaport Clark and former Forest Service boss Michael Dombeck -- have both landed at the National Wildlife Federation, which broadcasts across its Internet homepage, "Fires Are Good."



Fixing all of this won't be easy. After 30 years of environmental regulation, the Forest Service now spends 40% of its time in "planning and assessment." Even the smallest project takes years. Mr. Bosworth has identified the problems, but fixing them will require White House leadership and Congressional cooperation.



One solution would be to follow the lead of private timber companies, whose forests don't tend to suffer such catastrophic fires. Their trees are an investment; they can't afford to let them burn. Americans should feel the same way about theirs.



Rose Comstock-Correira
President
Alliance for America
www.allianceforamerica.org

[ftimmerman]

I live in Portland, OR, next door to a greenie, college educated couple. When I suggested that this summer's fires were a terrible waste, that thousands of jobs and billions of dollars could have been conributed to the economy by cutting the timber, they disagreed: "because most of the money would have gone to just a few of the rich." God help us.

[cake_crumb]

It stands to reason that if the environazis were really "saving the earth", they should have made some noticable improvement in the past three decades.

They haven't. Their permanent environmental revolution is no different that the concept of permanent revolution as social panacea used by any dictators, like Castro, Yasser and Saddam

[wanderin]

Nutmeg, I have not heard anything regarding the Applegate area. The Illinois Valley area is the one news agencies, etc. keep referring to. Your best bet is to contact local agencies there in the Applegate concerning your property.

The weather man reports more thunderstorms headed this way. (I hope he is wrong) Hopefully the storms will not cause any more fires from lightning strikes.

[Brad’s Gramma]

Well, lookie here. All you have to do is carefully clean out your cookies, and you can vote more than once!

What a deal!!!!

Post #33 for those who missed the SUV Freep...

[cake_crumb]

LOL...I have too, but lately, the nazis have been getting wise and have been accusing us right wingnuts of sending threatening emails.

[Grampa Dave]

The latest on what seems to be a black out re any reports since this morning:

Bulldozers cut last-ditch defense against fire

By JEFF BARNARD
The Associated Press
7/30/02 5:54 PM


CAVE JUNCTION, Ore. (AP) -- Bulldozers clanked along a ridge top Tuesday rebuilding old fire lines to create a 25-mile-long last bastion for the 17,000 residents of the Illinois Valley against the advance of a pair of wildfires.

The entire Illinois Valley in southwestern Oregon remained under an evacuation warning for the second straight day as the Florence Fire, sparked by lightning two weeks ago, burned out of control.

"There is a feeling of anxiety from residents, but a lot of us are saying we're going to wait until it gets closer," before leaving, said Bob Rodriguez, editor of the weekly newspaper The Illinois Valley News. "A lot of people have packed and either have their stuff right next to the door -- suitcases and medicines -- or they've got their stuff in their vehicles and are ready to go."

Residents closest to the fire have been warned to be ready to leave within 30 minutes of hearing a radio broadcast, while others throughout the valley were under a 24-hour evacuation notice.

Chevron gas station owner Jeff Stiles said quite a few people left the valley Monday, but those who remain seem calm. "This is a survivalist area," he said. "There are a lot of people who want to make a last stand at their own property. The people who stayed are a tough breed."

The crossroads animal hospital sold out of pet carriers and nearly ran out of sedatives for dogs and cats, said Sue Fiske.

The Josephine County Sheriff's Posse has been helping people round up livestock to transport to safer ground, and veterinarians and kennels in Grants Pass 30 miles away, are offering refuge for pets.

"It's amazing how many people can't find their leashes and collars for their pets and are coming in for new ones," said Fiske. "You really know what people are made of when you get hit by something like this. I think a lot of people are really compassionate."

At the local senior center, Floyd Watkins shot pool with Rusty Fox and said quite a few older residents have left the area because of problems breathing the smoke, but most have stayed, hoping for the best.

Changing weather promised a breath of cooler, more moist air off the Pacific Ocean that was expected to lower the volatility of the fire slightly. Winds were expected to diminish to 10 to 15 mph, but shift to the northwest, which could push flames closer to homes, fire spokeswoman Pam Leschak said.

The fleet of bulldozers was moving north and south from Woodcock Mountain, located halfway between Cave Junction and Selma. They were building a fire line one bulldozer wide along the ridge tops about a mile west of U.S. Highway 199, said U.S. Forest Service Illinois Valley District Ranger Tom Link. The line was based on the remains of fire lines built in 1994 to defend the valley against an earlier blaze.

Three homes have been lost to the 71,000-acre Florence Fire, which was within three miles of combining with the 25,200-acre Sour Biscuit Fire to the south to make a single fire of 96,200 acres.

Crews from 30 fire engines assembled from around the state under the Conflagration Act continued going door to door, plotting the locations of homes by Global Positioning System and assessing whether the structures can be saved if the fire keeps advancing. Firefighters will not defend houses that score "yes" answers to 11 tough questions, such as whether brush is within 30 feet.

After the Florence Fire blew up in explosive conditions on Sunday, firefighters backed off direct attack, concentrating on building bulldozer lines well in advance of the fire.

On the northern flank, more bulldozers were re-establishing fire lines from the 1987 Silver Fire to protect the community of Agness, a center of whitewater rafting on the Rogue River.

---

[cake_crumb]

WOW. Thanks for the link. This is a man after Hubby's an my own hearts. I'll have to order that book.

The author really ought to get it onto Amazon...IF they'll sell it there.

[cake_crumb]

"Aboriginal Americans and lightning have been lighting fires over many times the lifetime of a redwood tree. We thus have little idea what the distributions of flora were before then."

LOL...OR fauna. I have made this particular statement about a dozen times today, as I continue my hunt for environazi websites to nastygram.

Are you the author?

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks for this reply and posting of yours.

I/we have two personal memories of the beginning of this incidence, the storm, and then the fire.

We were returning from a visit to Oregon and got caught in that storm on 101. It was a night mare. If we had pulled off of the road, we might been caught in flood waters and still be buried in some mud slide.

December 1995, a storm hit the Six Rivers National Forest in northern California, tossing dead trees across 35,000 acres and creating dangerous fire conditions. For three years local U.S. Forest Service officials labored to clean it up, but they were blocked by environmental groups and federal policy. In 1999 the time bomb blew: A fire roared over the untreated land and 90,000 more acres.

Flash forward three years and in September. We drove to Brookings Oregon north on 101 in mid September. The smoke from this fire was very largee. You could see it before you got into Eureka. The plume went up as far north as just south of Brookings. They just let the fire burn out. There was basically a news blackout and no one knew about the fire except those down smoke of the fire.

That has had high unemployment since the rural cleansing of loggers/logging companies during the spotted owl fiasco. The enviralists keep most salvage logging from happening after that hugh storm. So then the logs catch on fire and burn up and help burn close to 100,000 acres, 3 years later.

[Grampa Dave]

John Huang has another thread on how the Sour Biscuit and the other fires in the Illinois Valley forced WND to shut down. In case you haven't seen this thread: (Fires force WND HQ evacuation: Uncontrolled Southern Oregon blaze threatens WND HQ offices)

[BOBTHENAILER]

the 71,000-acre Florence Fire, which was within three miles of combining with the 25,200-acre Sour Biscuit Fire to the south to make a single fire of 96,200 acres

They have combined. Fox news is reporting that now. God help those 17,000 people in the valley.

[Grampa Dave]

Dear, that man is none other than Carry Okie. You hubby will love his book!

[cake_crumb]

"Because despite the Sierra Club spin, catastrophic fires like the Hayman are not inevitable, or good. They stem from bad forest management -- which found a happy home in the Clinton Administration."

Something I've been trying to get across, with little success, for the past four years. Thank heaven for publications like the WSJ.

The Alliance for America's evil environazi counterpart, the American Lands Alliance is using a sililar name in order to give themselves a vaneer of phony legitimacy. Like many other environazi organizations.

[Grampa Dave]

Bob, thanks for breaking the blackout.

This is terrible news.

Pray for those 17,000 innocent Americans caught up in the political rural cleansing of the Green terrorists.

[cake_crumb]

"Well, lookie here"

FReeping environazi polls is FUN!

Results so far:

Impose higher gasoline taxes.	5 %
10% tax on the retail price of autos above $30,000.	4 %
Increase tax incentives for consumers who purchase hybrid or electric cars.	37 %
Launch a massive campaign condemning SUV's environmental record.	10 %
All of the above.	31 %
None of the above.	10 %
	672 ballots cast
Here's the link again for those who missed it: Anti-SUV poll

[cake_crumb]

"Dear, that man is none other than Carry Okie. You hubby will love his book!"

LOL...I suspected as much. Yes, hubby WILL love this book, because I was reading him some of the articles on the site, and CO says the same things we've been saying for years.

CO, you are a GEM!!

[cake_crumb]

Giggling evilly, and probably making Hubby think I've lost what little sanity I've ever been credited with having, I sent nicegrams to a few environazis, suggesting they educate themselves by studying your book.

[Grampa Dave]

You do need God's help living next door to a left wing Watermelon couple like that. Unfortunately there are more of them in Portland than people like you.