Wildfires continued to burn without containment up and down the length of the West Coast on Thursday, with smoke blotting out the sun in parts of Oregon and California. In Oregon, officials were beginning to take stock of the damage, particularly from the Glendower Fire, also known as the Almeda Fire, which has threatened parts of the city of Medford and largely destroyed the towns of Ashland, Phoenix and Talent to the southeast of the city.
Red-flag warnings for critical wildfire weather remained in effect for parts of Oregon and Washington state through the early hours Thursday, but after that, weather was expected to improve, with slackening winds compared with the howling gales that led to so many rapidly spreading blazes at once.
At least seven people, including a 1-year-old boy, have died in California, Oregon and Washington state amid the dozens of wildfires burning throughout the varied landscapes of the American West, officials announced Wednesday.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D) sought to prepare her state for sobering news about the fires’ toll at a news conference Wednesday. “We expect to see a great deal of loss, both in structures and in human lives," she said. “This could be the greatest loss of human lives and property due to wildfire in our state’s history.”
Officials in northern Washington state announced that a 1-year-old boy died and his parents were severely burned in the Cold Springs Fire. Okanogan County Sheriff Tony Hawley said in a news conference that his office received a call Tuesday afternoon about Jacob and Jamie Hyland, a young couple from Renton, Wash., who were reported missing while visiting Okanogan with their son.
Hawley said the family attempted to escape the fire as it approached the property where they were staying. Rescuers first found their truck, which was burned and wrecked, and then located the family on the bank of the Columbia River on Wednesday morning.
The parents had third-degree burns and were flown to a Seattle hospital for treatment.
The smoke from the siege of blazes was fouling air quality in California, Oregon and Washington. The U.S. government’s Air Quality Index showed large areas of code-red or “unhealthy” air quality in all three states. In California and Oregon, pockets of code purple and amber, signifying very unhealthy and hazardous pollution levels, were present. Pollution levels near Salem, Ore., were the highest on the planet, based on values reported to the international database at the website waqi.info
Oregon fires
In southwestern Oregon, wildfires continued to burn across thousands of acres, including in timber-dominated ecosystems in a part of the typically rainy state where such fires are relatively rare. With some blazes, such as the nearly 160,000-acre Santiam Fire, emerging evidence suggests that downed power lines from strong winds played a role in helping flames spread.
The remains of one person were found in Ashland, and the Glendower Fire that affected Medford, Talent and Phoenix has prompted a criminal investigation to determine whether it was deliberately sparked.
In Mehama, Ore., a 12-year-old boy and his grandmother were killed trying to flee the Santiam Fire on Wednesday, which stood at 159,000 acres and zero percent containment as of Thursday morning.
Family members confirmed to KPTV that 12-year-old Wyatt Tofte and his grandmother, Peggy Mosso, died inside their car next to the family’s home. (Officials also found the remains of the boy’s dog in the vehicle.) Wyatt’s mother suffered severe burns and remained in critical condition, family told KGW.
The National Weather Service forecast office in Medford was predicting shifting winds and continued hot and dry conditions Thursday, but the strong winds that have characterized the past few days of historic fire spread were finally dying down. There is even some rain in the forecast for early next week, though it won’t be enough to squelch the flames.
“We’ll see winds shift from east to southeast or northwest to west to northwest in the afternoon,” the NWS stated in a technical discussion. “It will remain dry today with plenty of smoke covering most of the forecast area.”
The forecast high for Medford was 100 degrees, but in a sign of how dense the smoke is, the NWS said that may not be reached, because the smoke is absorbing and scattering much of the incoming solar radiation, preventing it from heating the air near the ground.
California fires
In California, at least three people have died and 12 remained missing in the Bear Fire, now called the North Complex West Zone, that advanced about 25 miles in 24 hours between Tuesday and Wednesday, threatening to burn into Oroville. That fire has damaged or destroyed about 2,000 structures, according to Cal Fire, the state firefighting agency.
The fire is part of the larger North Complex Fire, which has rapidly became the state’s 10th-largest blaze on record, burning about 247,358 acres acres through Thursday morning with 23 percent containment. This fire burned through timber, much of it dead trees that were weakened or killed off by the five-year drought that affected the state from 2011 to 2017. In a single day, it consumed over 200,000 acres.
Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said in a news conference Wednesday that two of the three dead were found in the same location. The other victim was discovered near Berry Creek by a California Highway Patrol officer who suspected they fled from their car in an unsuccessful attempt to escape the fire, the San Jose Mercury News reported. The sheriff’s office was working to identify the victims and notify their families, Honea said.
Smoke was so thick that it turned the sky orange across the San Francisco Bay area Wednesday, with birds failing to sense daybreak.
We’re in uncharted territory
As of Thursday, California had seen more than 3.1 million acres burned this year, the largest amount of land on record — with the heart of the Southern California fire season still to come.
Cal Fire released a slew of statistics Thursday showing just how severe the fires have been. An astonishing 3.1 million acres have burned this year, which is up from a total of 2.5 million acres as of Wednesday.
There have been 12 wildfire-related fatalities this year. More than 3,900 structures have been destroyed.
Six of the top 20 largest wildfires in California history have occurred in 2020.
These fires include the August Complex (No. 1), SCU Lightning Complex (No. 3); LNU Lightning Complex (No. 4), North Complex (No. 10); and Creek Fire (No. 17).
In addition, the LNU complex and the August complex both are on the top-10 list of the most destructive fires in state history.
Two fires also made it onto the top 10 most destructive fires list, and the LNU Lightning Complex ranks as the 19th-deadliest fire on record in California.
The simultaneous outbreak of fires across such a large expanse, plus the staggering speeds with which these fires advanced, have led wildfire experts to say this was an unprecedented event in modern times. In fact, the only comparable event mentioned is the Great Blow Up of 1910, when a massive blaze swept across parts of Montana and Idaho, according to Nick Nauslar, a predictive services meteorologist with the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.
“Multiple fires made 20-plus mile runs in 24 hours over the last few days in California, Oregon and Washington,” Nauslar said. Such distances traveled so quickly may not be all that rare in grassland fires, Nauslar noted.
“However, most of these fires are making massive runs in timber and burning tens of thousands of acres and in some cases 100,000-plus acres in one day,” Nauslar said. “The sheer amount of fire on the landscape is surreal, and no one I have talked to can remember anything like it.”
This wildfire event “rivals the past fire season in Australia,” he said, noting that more acres burned overall in Australia’s devastating fire season, however.
In addition to the 3.1 million acres burned in California, 672,000 and 500,000 acres have been lost in Oregon and Washington state respectively.
The wildfires come after a record-shattering heat wave that sent temperatures across the region soaring through the triple digits, and amid human-caused climate change that is heightening fire risks in the West.
These blazes have been driven by strong, dry, offshore winds that contributed to extreme fire behavior, which produced everything from mushroom cloud-like plumes of smoke that reach 40,000 feet in height, to fire tornadoes that make it impossible for firefighters to contain an advancing blaze.
After a mid-August heat wave and wildfire outbreak in California, the heat wave that struck the region in the past week dried vegetation out to a record extent, priming it for burning.
John Abatzoglou, a climate researcher at the University of California at Merced, noted one key fire index that measures the thirst of the atmosphere showed record-setting conditions across a vast expanse of the West this week. As he explained on Twitter, the vapor-pressure deficit “is the difference between how much moisture the air can hold (which increases nonlinearly with temperature) and how much moisture is in the air.”
Extremely low vapor pressure means conditions are hot and the air is extremely dry. This, combined with an early-season down-sloping wind event, helped lead to this wildfire outbreak — once sparks lit new blazes and winds hit preexisting fires.
A study published in August shows climate change is increasing the risk of extreme wildfire conditions during the fall season in California. The state’s frequency of fall days with extreme fire-weather conditions has more than doubled since the 1980s, the study found.
The unprecedented fires have forced authorities to take previously unheard of actions.
Following the rescue of hundreds of stranded hikers, campers and others from the advancing Creek Fire earlier in the week, the U.S. Forest Service announced the closure of all 18 national forests in California on Wednesday afternoon in response to “unprecedented and historic fire conditions.”
The closures cover more than 20 million acres of forest, an area about 26 times the size of Rhode Island.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/09/10/western-fires-fatalities-homes/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_wildfires-1140am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans
