Firefighting team attacks lightning fires

"Bear" (driver's seat) and his GFP Enterprises contract firefighting crew set up on Saturday morning to roll on multiple lightningfires. photo by Jim Cornelius

Saturday, August 14, 9 a.m. -- Firefighters from around Central Oregon staged in Sisters on Saturday morning to attack 28 wildfires that sprang up in the wake of a Friday evening thunderstorm.

"We are working to contain them, and to identify them," said a dispatcher at the Prineville-based Central Oregon Interagency Dispatch center. "We're still picking them up."

"We have a group of them on Squawback Ridge, a group of them on Black Butte itself," the dispatcher said.

There were other blazes southwest of Sisters in the Trout Creek drainage and fires in the Three Sisters Wilderness and the Mt. Washington Wilderness.

Most of the fires were small; the largest is about five or six acres, located on Squawback Ridge on private land owned by Ponderosa Land Company.