Fire season… It’s b-a-a-a-c-k!
June 04, 2015
Don't let last week’s rain fool you: Fire season is here. It started on Oregon Department of Forestry protected lands in Southwest Oregon on June 5, and will start soon in other parts of the state. With drought, weather predictions and fuel dryness, it could be another doozy.
Tom Fields, forestry fire prevention coordinator for the Oregon Department of Forestry, shows in the recently released “Hot Sheet” that there were 129 wildfires on ODF-protected land the first five months of this year that burned a total of 320 acres. Leading causes were debris burning and recreation (unattended campfires), which accounted for a total of 70 fires scorching 106 acres. These and everything except lightning-caused fires are totally preventable and would have been much worse if not for our world-class ODF firefighting system.
This amount of fire activity is near the 10-year average in number of fires and acres burned for January through May. What is not average is the fire behavior being reported by ODF firefighters. Due to the dryness of the fuels, fires this spring were already behaving like summer fires. Which only begs the question, “How will summer fires behave?”
Following record-high-cost fire seasons in 2013 and 2014, there is increasing concern about the cost of fires to landowners in forest protective associations, and to taxpayers through the state’s general fund. The cost of fighting fires the past biennium totaled $200 million. And that doesn’t include the value of homes, buildings or timber.
Once ODF declares fire season, logging operations and landowners must follow strict fire prevention requirements that include having fire tools, a water supply and a Firewatch. The June Hot Sheet contains a table showing the amount of fire tools needed based on crew size. Smoking is prohibited.
New for this season is an interactive fire restrictions map that shows what the current Industrial Fire Prevention Level (I-IV) is for various parts of the state and what current restrictions are. Check it out here.
With nearly 70 percent of fires being human-caused, the adage of my old friend Smokey Bear rings truer than ever. “Only You . . .”
For the forest,
Mike Cloughesy
Director of Forestry
