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.