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Lightning strikes sparked at least 72 wildfires in Jackson and Josephine counties overnight, and the Oregon Department of Forestry raced today to put an incident team in place at the southwest corner of the state. The new blazes are the latest chapter in an Oregon wildfire season on pace to rival its destructive predecessors.
The line of thunderstorms peppered lightning into a region of the state that federal monitors say is unusually dry. That puts it in line with much of the Pacific Northwest—in fact, the National Interagency Fire Center lists the whole of Oregon as having “significant wildland fire potential” for the month of July.
And it wasn’t like June was dull. Last month, the Rowena Fire in the Columbia River Gorge consumed 56 homes and 91 other buildings. Meanwhile, debates over who should pay for wildfire damage gripped the Oregon Legislature this session. (Lawmakers passed a wildfire mitigation fund bankrolled by a tax on Zyn and other oral tobacco products, but a bill to spur utilities to compensate the victims of fires sparked by power lines died in committee.)
The latest round of fires was first reported by The Hotshot Wake Up, a firefighting newsletter. It reported that most of the Josephine and Jackson wildfires are are the smaller end. But the Elk Fire in nearby Klamath County is behaving aggressively. The fire is currently estimated at 20 acres. The Klamath County Sheriff’s Department has issued evacuation orders.
This evening, ODF announced it had deployed Incident Management Team 3 to assist in Southwest Oregon.
“Our firefighters have been working around the clock to keep these fires as small as we can, but resources are becoming limited, especially with other incidents across Oregon and the country competing for the same emergency response professionals,” ODF Southwest Oregon District Forester Dan Quinones said in a statement. “Bringing in ODF IMT 3 will allow us to regain our strength locally, handing some of these fires off to firefighters who hold the same drive to take them off the map as quickly as possible. Protecting our communities and putting out fires remain our top priorities.”
