Officers confident lightning caused fire

"We were just sitting down to dinner at our place out near Plainview Road; the sky was almost black with big, dark clouds hanging over the Three Sisters, when all of a sudden lightning flashed off to the north of North Sister," Peggy Fischer said. "I couldn't tell for sure if it hit the ground, it lit up the whole cloud - but the next morning I knew it did...

"When we sat down for breakfast I saw a curl of smoke - like a morning fire from someone's chimney - coming out of the forest where I saw the lightning the night before, and said, uh, oh, I guess it did hit the ground."

For most people, that would have been proof enough that the cause of the Pole Creek Fire was lightning, but for Dan Smith, Deschutes National Forest patrol captain, the cause had to be scientifically proved, not left up to opinions, or hearsay, and his law enforcement officers began their investigation.

That investigation was highlighted at an open house hosted by the Forest Service at Sisters Fire Hall on Tuesday, November 13.

In their search for evidence, investigators discovered a time-lapse film from Brasada Ranch that compressed the whole day before the fire into three minutes of viewing. As the film progressed from dawn to dark September 8, the weather went from clear blue sky, showing the wind coming out of the south, to a buildup of clouds, then to towering cumulous clouds by nightfall - duplicating the entire scene and description presented by Peggy Fischer. The next morning, at dawn, the film showed the chimney-like smoke Peggy described drifting from a fire near the Pole Creek Trailhead.

Smith still wasn't satisfied; he had to know for sure. So, he went through the official protocols called for when confronted with a fire of "unknown origin."

The investigation began with the statement of the first person to arrive at the fire: Dave Robertson of the Bend/Fort Rock District.

"Yeah," Dave said, "I was totally alone when I arrived at the closest spot to the fire; I could see smoke about a quarter of a mile away from the end of the road, but all I could see between where I parked and where the smoke was coming from was dead-and-down lodgepole in a heavy jackstraw mess. Climbing through the dead-and-down to the fire was tough. When I arrived I found it burning with about three- to four-foot flames in that 50-to-60-ton-an-acre jackstraw and it scared me pretty bad; I didn't want to be there."

What he saw next prompted him to call for help and then get out as fast as possible; a big dead fir was turning into a torch right in front of him, igniting dead trees around it. As it turned out, he was looking at the very point of ignition where the lightning strike observed by Peggy Fischer had been smoldering all night and suddenly broke out into a full blaze.

Before law enforcement officer Dan Smith settled on lightning as the origin, however, his personnel went through other factors as the possible cause of the fire anyway:

• Campfire - no evidence was found.

• Mechanical or electric spark - no evidence.

• Miscellaneous, such as blasting, structure, fireworks, welding, target-shooting, grinding or other man-made factors - no evidence.

• Smoking - based on Robertson's statement when he arrived at the fire, there was no evidence of anyone else having been at that remote location prior to his arrival.

That left lightning, and the search went on for anyone having witnessed such an event. Dan and his crew looked into the BLM's National Interagency Fire Center records for dates from July 27 through September 9, for the possibility of holdover lightning. There were records of strikes, but the elapsed time from those historic strikes was too long. Lighting occurrence records were also obtained from the Vaisala STRIKEnet system for dates August 5 through September 9, and they found the "Ah-ha" moment: Lighting bursts had occurred the night before the Pole Creek Fire was discovered.

Finally, after an exhaustive search, Dan and his personnel turned up three witnesses to lightning strikes in the vicinity of the Pole Creek Fire area (one of whom was Peggy Fischer). From their statements and weather data, coupled with what Dave Robertson found when he arrived at the fire scene, Smith and his law enforcement crew were confident that lightning was, indeed, the cause of the Pole Creek Fire.