Fire season is upon us

Last Thursday around 2 p.m., we were reminded that summer is here: The first thunderstorm of the season erupted over the Cascades.

You can watch the summer heat mixing with the moisture of cold waters lifted from the Pacific beginning to store up energy in the atmosphere that often brings about those glorious lighting storms.

If the results were just nature's grand fireworks display when the sky is all ablaze, such storms would be nothing but a thrill for local residents - but we all know that wildfire often follows those magnificent storms.

Every lighting strike of last Thursday's storm was monitored in the Sisters Ranger District's fire office. One hit in the lava below Belknap Crater, another alongside Road 1260, and both were watched to ensure they didn't result in a wildfire.

Natural wildfire has been going on since time immemorial. The mighty ponderosa pines growing on the lava and hillsides of Central Oregon are not only adapted to fire, they are completely dependent on fire. But like so many range life-forms that are also dependent on fire, there can be too much of a good thing when wildfire covers thousands of acres and begins to devour everything in its path.

The Forest Service (USFS) has been in the firefighting business ever since the father of the service, Gifford Pinchot, laid down the gauntlet in the early 20th century and announced, "There will be NO fire in our forests!" And, if early forest rangers knew what was good for them, they made sure that edict was followed.

Fire lookout towers began springing up throughout the forest preserves established by Pinchot and President Theodore Roosevelt.

Here in the Sisters Country the first fire lookout was in a tall ponderosa pine, then later a tower and live-in cabin were built on the summit of Black Butte, while other buttes and high ridges within the newly established Deschutes National Forest also had lookouts built on them.

Prior to the telephone, fires were reported by passenger pigeons released by the person in the lookout tower. In other areas small blasts of dynamite were used to signal firefighters in town that there was a fire in the vicinity of the lookout tower.

All through the ensuing years, the USFS got better and better at fighting wildfire in the forest. But in spite of new tools, training, and equipment - such as huge bulldozers, airplanes that carried and deployed hundreds of gallons of fire retardant, helicopters, and rough-and-tough fire engines - fire still continues to roll over forests, burn out millions of acres of valuable forest resources and destroy millions of dollars of property.

Residents of Sisters have seen this happen over and over, and people concerned with the gigantic costs of fighting fire and the millions of dollars lost because of the failure to control such events ask why.

That was the case when the lighting-caused Black Crater Fire erupted about 3 p.m. on July 2, 2006, eventually blackening over 9,000 acres of forest and prime wildlife habitat.

The Black Crater incident had its beginning as a small lightning-caused fire that could have been confined if it had been closer to town and in calmer weather. But it started in a wilderness area, a little tougher to get to, and it was very windy at the time. Smoke jumpers, one of the most effective first-response tools, could not be deployed. It just wasn't safe to ask men and women of this highly trained force to jump on the fire.

However, a hot shot crew, plus a small contingent of Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) and USFS firefighters did all they could to keep it down.

"Fires are like a giant chess game," said Mark Rapp, fire management officer for the Sisters Ranger District. "Trying to use the best equipment for the best purpose in any fire, especially one that was going like the Black Crater Fire is tricky."

There were other fires going that day, and the interagency team controlling the various firefighting resources were forced to send a helicopter helping with the Black Crater Fire over to Elk Lake to fight another fire that was threatening homes. The combination of wind, dry conditions, allocation of equipment, manpower and fire fuels took over.

The fire blew up into a major emergency incident.

In spite of the fact that the usual contingency plan for wildfire was set up well in advance by fire planners early in the fire season, the "squeaky wheel" syndrome took over the chess game. As the conflagration raced out of the wilderness into public and private forest lands, fire departments from throughout Central Oregon responded with mutual aid. When over 400 residents of Crossroads and an additional 200 people living near Edgington were told to leave, firefighting equipment and personnel from as far away as Lincoln City and throughout the Willamette Valley were on the scene to help.

It's all a matter of available resources - and so far Central Oregon is relatively resource-rich this fire season.

As we speak, there are four Forest Service firefighting engines and two initial-attack crews on hand in Sisters for immediate response to the next wildfire. The Sisters Oregon Department of Forestry headquarters has engines and personnel ready to go, and has contracted with Butler Aviation in Redmond for use of DC-6 and/or DC-7 air tankers that will respond immediately to a fire.

(Due to last year's C-130 air-tanker crashes and safety concerns, the USFS cannot use the Boeing DC-6s and 7s; federal law prohibits the use of such aircraft without the manufacturer's certification that they are airworthy - even though they have been approved by the FAA - and to date, Boeing has not issued such certification.)

Interagency teams throughout the nation are ready to roll, and can be on the scene of the incident within 24 to 48 hours. If another wildfire is ignited by nature or man, the Sisters Country can expect help almost overnight. The Interagency Dispatch Center in Central Oregon has 26 engines and four hand-crews who will respond to fires as far south as Crescent and north to the Columbia River.

But all that said, there are other things in the wildfire chess game to take into consideration, such as: duty days; firefighter stress; budgets for the over 200 contract firefighters available in Oregon; weather; fuels; and allocation of firefighting resources among multiple fires.

Then there are "mission differences," as Tom Andrade, ODF Interface Specialist points out: "If we're (ODF) on a fire on private land, we're bound by the state law that commands us to 'Stop all fires on private land.' Therefore, we cannot respond to the call for help from other agencies."

Taking all these elements into consideration, Ben Duda, ODF assistant unit forester in the Sisters ODF headquarters, sums up what everyone in the firefighting business relates to: "In the initial attack, it doesn't matter what color the truck is; it's in everyone's better interest to stop the fire - something you don't read about in the papers."