Aggressive attack quells fire

The Cache Creek fire, which broke out 13 miles west of Sisters on Monday afternoon, August 2, threw a dense pall of smoke over the Sisters community.

As ash began to fall over the town, some residents wondered if this would be the "Big One," the all-but-inevitable devastating wildfire feared by those living surrounded by forests.

The potential was there. According to Christy Donham, information officer for the interagency team that battled the blaze, firefighters fought hard to prevent the fire from spreading into the bug-killed forest nearby.

"One of the objectives was to make sure that the fire was stopped and didn't get to Cache Mountain," Donham said. "It's dead standing timber and it would have burned hot and fast."

Once a fire gets into that kind of terrain, Donham said, it is very difficult and dangerous to fight.

The Central Oregon Interagency Incident Management Team launched an all-out attack on the fire, battling the blaze from the air and on the ground.

According to Donham, there were 446 total personnel fighting the fire at its peak on August 3, including hotshots, engine crews and hand crews. Six helicopters ferried water from Meadow Lake to drop it on the fire from buckets and four air tankers made repeated retardant drops.

The aggressive attack worked. Though the fire burned 383 acres, firefighters prevented the conflagration from expanding its perimeter over a critical 48-hour period.

In the meantime, the Sisters country was hammered with powerful thunderstorms that brought repeated lightning strikes - and heavy rain.

"We had all that rain," Donham said, "but it didn't touch the fire."

Donham acknowledged that the wind died down over the week and did not play a major role in fanning the fire.

From Donham's perspective, all credit for stopping the Cache Creek fire goes to "the firefighters... they just did their job."

Doing that job as quickly and aggressively as they did on this fire is expensive. Large amounts of manpower were thrown into the attack and the heavy use of air assets ran up the bill. As of Fri- day, August 6, the cost of fighting the Cache Creek fire was estimated at $1.4 million.

But a fire that could have gotten much bigger and threatened populated areas and campgrounds was held down and fought into submission. The fire was declared contained on Wednesday, August 4, and declared controlled Thursday, August 5.

The staging camp at Sisters High School was dismantled on Saturday, August 7, and the fire was turned over to the Sisters Ranger District for final mop-up operations.

Author Bio

Jim Cornelius, Editor in Chief

Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.

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