Expanding Emigrant Fire fed by ‘logs stacked on top of each other,’ official says

Team leaders battling the Emigrant Fire discussed a week of explosive forest fire growth at a community meeting Friday, Aug. 29 in Oakridge.

The Emigrant Fire, roughly 20 miles southeast of Oakridge, has grown to about 19,500 acres as of Saturday, Aug. 30, after starting from a lightning strike Aug. 24, affecting air quality in the Oakridge area. 

“The pattern we see, and we’ve seen the last few days, [is that] you get this beautiful afternoon, beautiful evening, [a] a nice morning. But as that inversion starts to break down, you get that smoke pulling down at the surface right around midday,” Josh Hall, an air resource advisor, told the crowd.

Hall said he expects the pattern in Oakridge to continue “for the foreseeable future.” A Saturday morning update from fire officials described smoke being kept out of the Willamette Valley by an onshore flow of moist air forming a marine layer.

A Facebook page with official information about the Emigrant Fire, including about air quality, will be updated, Hall and other fire officials said. 

The fire has not hit any structures. Fire leaders said they’ve identified “critical values” to protect, such as wooden bridges that cross waterways, campgrounds and the Middle Fork riverside trail. The U.S. Forest Service has issued an order listing sites, trails and roads now closed to the public.

Team leaders explained that the fire quickly grew because it burned in an area within the boundaries of the 2009 Tumblebug Complex Fire.

The past fire led to the heavy fuel load that’s been feeding the fire and affecting suppression efforts, burning an area dense with “chest high brush in many of those locations, stuff that promotes rapid fire spread and extreme fire behavior,” said Jimmer Hunt, fire management officer for the Middle Fork Ranger District.

John Spencer, operations section chief with the Emigrant Fire command team, known as Northwest Incident Management Team 13, described “dead and down” logs “stacked on top of each other,” feeding the fire.

Sugar Loaf Fire

Another lightning-caused forest fire, known as the Sugar Loaf Fire, also began Sunday, about eight miles southwest of Oakridge. It’s been kept to 53 acres, and, while not contained, fire leaders on Friday described completing fire breaks, specifically hand and dozer lines, to halt the fire’s advance.

Earlier in the week, “we chose to take quite a few crews off the Emigrant Fire and put them on [the Sugar Loaf] fire and hit it hard, so that we weren’t managing two large fires over the course of our time being here,” Spencer said.

In fighting the Sugar Loaf blaze, early decisions before the establishment of an incident management team “set us up for success,” Spencer said.

“The initial attack resources decided they could safely engage a direct strategy on that fire, and that means going up close against the fire’s edge and try to get around that fire and keep that fire small and within its footprint,” Spencer said.

But the amount of fuel load around the Emigrant Fire prevented such a direct strategy, Spencer said.

“The intensity that you’ve been seeing is due to all that intense heat from the logs burning,” Spencer said. He said that with the fire now emerging from that “old burn scar” onto lands that have been logged, the team is “hoping that we’re going to see more moderate fire behavior.”

Spencer added, however, that the upcoming weather is a concern. After a dip in temperatures, the forecast calls for a return to hot and dry conditions by Tuesday, according to a Saturday morning update posted on the Emigrant Fire Facebook page.

Northwest Incident Management Team 13 took over command of firefighting efforts on Tuesday, Aug. 26.

Some in the crowd questioned a lack of salvage effort after past fires, with one person in attendance calling it a “huge part of the problem with fires growing larger in the last few decades.”

“We’re looking at opportunities for any kind of salvage that might be available once we stop smoking up there,” said Gabe Wishart, district ranger for the Middle Forks District and agency administrator for the blaze.

One person in the crowd asked about a report from Washington state about two firefighters taken into Border Patrol custody for reasons related to their immigration status. One of the firefighters is reportedly from Oregon, and the person in the crowd asked if U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had come to any of the fire sites.

“We have had zero impact from the outside, from anybody, frankly, coming into our fire area,” said Brian Gales, the team incident commander.