It impacted the cities of Talent and Phoenix, September 8, 2020
Devastation from the Almeda Drive Fire in the area of Phoenix and Talent in southern Oregon. Screenshot from video shot by Jackson County on September 8, 2020.
The latest official estimate of the number of structures destroyed in the Almeda Drive Fire in southern Oregon on September 8 is 600 homes and 100 commercial buildings. A video appears to indicate that number is conservative.
(Update November 19, 2020: Jackson County estimates 2,357 residences were destroyed in the 3,200-acre fire.)
Authorities have confirmed two deaths. Since lightning and power lines can be ruled out, they have concluded it was human-caused. It is possible the number of fatalities could rise as searches are conducted. It was weeks before searches were concluded after the Camp Fire at Paradise, California. There will be lists of people that are unaccounted for, but many of them will be safe and having difficulty communicating with family and friends.
Map of the Almeda Drive Fire
The Oregonian reports officials are considering arson as a possible cause:
Authorities are investigating the Almeda fire as an arson after discovering human remains in Ashland, the city police chief said. The Jackson County’s Major Assault/Death Investigation Unit is investigating the nature of the death of the person found, according to Ashland Police Chief Tighe O’Meara.
“One thing I can say is that the rumor it was set by Antifa is 100% false information,” the police chief said by email. “We have some leads, and none of it points in that direction.”
Devastation from the Almeda Drive Fire in the area of Phoenix and Talent in southern Oregon. Screenshot from video shot by Jackson County on September 8, 2020.
The FBI is asking the public to not waste the time of law enforcement with conspiracy theories and misinformation.
To have been so destructive, it is a little surprising that the fire only burned 3,200 acres. The 40 to 45 mph wind on September 8 was from the southeast, which aligned with the Interstate 5 corridor as it burned like a blowtorch for 8 miles, starting north of Ashland and tearing through the cities of Talent and Phoenix. Photos of what remains of the area show retardant drops made by air tankers, a DC-10 and two MD-87s, but they were largely ineffective. This is no surprise, since a wind stronger than 15 or 20 mph can scatter the retardant off target, or if the wind is stronger and turbulent it can be unsafe to operate an aircraft flying low and slow.
The video shot by Jackson County authorities on September 8 is below. It begins near Ashland, then continues up the Interstate 5 corridor through Talent and Phoenix.
An Area Command Team has been mobilized to assist local units in the state
Devastation from the Almeda Drive Fire in the area of Phoenix and Talent in southern Oregon. Screenshot from video shot by Jackson County on September 8, 2020.
It could take some time to count all of the structures that have burned in western Oregon. What is known so far about the huge fires that have burned approximately a million acres in the state is the deaths of seven people have been documented according to state officials. Dozens more, they said, are unaccounted for, but many of those could be safe and are having difficulty communicating with friends and relatives.
The number of people that have evacuated has been fluctuating wildly. The Oregonian reported that the state in a news release Thursday night said an “estimated 500,000 Oregonians have been evacuated and that number continues to grow.” The half-million figure received widespread attention, but after an analysis by the newspaper determined that number could not be accurate, Gov. Kate Brown acknowledged Friday the true number to be far lower, about 40,000. She explained that the higher figure included everyone in some category of evacuation, including “Be Set,” and “Be Ready.”
Map of heat detected on wildfires in the western U.S. by satellites September 12, 2020.
The weather next week is expected to be cooler, with decreasing winds and a slight chance of rain on Tuesday and Thursday. This should slow the spread of the blazes and enable firefighters to shift from evacuations to constructing fireline on the perimeters. Up until now, a very, very small percentage of the edges of the fires have containment line.
Doug Grafe, chief of fire protection at the Oregon Department of Forestry, said eight of the large fires “will be on our landscape until the winter rains fall. Those fires represent close to 1 million acres … We will see smoke and we will have firefighters on those fires up until the heavy rains.”
Three Area Command Teams (ACT) were mobilized Thursday to assist local units in suppressing the fires in the western states. One of them, led by Area Commander Joe Stutler, will be coordinating the efforts in northwest Oregon. The other two will be California.
Typically an ACT is used to oversee the management of large incidents or those to which multiple Incident Management Teams have been assigned. They can take some of the workload off the local administrative unit when they have multiple incidents going at the same time. Your typical Forest or Park is not usually staffed to supervise two or more Incident Management Teams fighting fire in their area. An ACT can provide decision support to Multi-Agency Coordination Groups for allocating scarce resources and help mitigate the span of control for the local Agency Administrator. They also ensure that incidents are properly managed, coordinate team transitions, and evaluate Incident Management Teams.
Devastation from the Almeda Drive Fire in the area of Phoenix and Talent in southern Oregon. Screenshot from video shot by Jackson County on September 8, 2020.Satellite photo showing smoke from wildfires at 5:17 p.m. PDT September 11, 2020.
Claremont-Bear Fire, Sept. 8, 2020. By Lori Mallory Eckhart.
Lori Mallory Eckhart took these remarkable photos of the Claremont-Bear Fire September 8, 2020, the day it made a massive run west to Oroville, California increasing in size by more than 100,000 acres in 24 hours. The camera she used was a Nikon D7100 with an f/3.5-6.3 18-300 mm lens.
The Claremont and Bear Fires burned together and are now managed as part of the 252,000-acre North Complex organization.
The white cloud above the smoke is a pyrocumulus cloud produced by the intense heating of the air over a fire. This induces convection, which causes the air mass to rise to a point of stability, where condensation occurs. If the fire is large enough, the cloud may continue to grow, becoming a cumulonimbus flammagenitus which may produce lightning and start another fire.
Claremont-Bear Fire, Sept. 8, 2020. By Lori Mallory Eckhart.Claremont-Bear Fire, Sept. 8, 2020. By Lori Mallory Eckhart.Claremont-Bear Fire, Sept. 8, 2020. By Lori Mallory Eckhart.Claremont-Bear Fire, Sept. 8, 2020. By Lori Mallory Eckhart.
Above is the forecast for the distribution of smoke from wildfires at 5 a.m. PDT, September 12, 2020.
The satellite photo below shows much of the smoke from the west coast fires being blown out over the Pacific, while some remains in Washington, Oregon, and California, and also is being transported to the east.
And, an update on the shelter deployment at the Dolan Fire
Map of the North Complex, Claremont & Bear Fires 11:12 a.m. PDT Sept 11, 2020.
A firefighting hand crew was overrun by the fire they were fighting September 9 and had to deploy their fire shelters. It happened on the Claremont/Bear Fire, two merged blazes that are part of the North Complex.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection explained that the fire became unpredictable due to erratic weather and dry fuel conditions. The agency said the personnel were “virtually unharmed except for two minor injuries.” The incident is under review.
Fire Shelter Tests in Canada, June, 2015.
Fire shelters are small foldable pup tent-like fire resistant devices that a wildland firefighter can unfold and climb into if there is no option for escaping from an approaching inferno. The shelters can resist radiant heat, and if the person inside can seal the edges under their body, convective heat as well, but there are limits. Many firefighters have used the devices successfully, but others have been killed inside them.
The North Complex has burned 252,534 acres east of Oroville, California. Approximately 1,000 structures have been destroyed and 10 civilians have been killed. Resources assigned include 73 hand crews, 18 helicopters, 254 fire engines, 76 dozers, and 98 water tenders for a total of 3,108 personnel.
On September 5, three firefighters on the Bridger Foothills Fire northeast of Bozeman, Montana were forced to deploy and take refuge in their fire shelters when their safety became compromised by the proximity of the blaze, fire officials said.
September 8 on the Dolan Fire south of Big Sur, California, another crew of firefighters was entrapped and deployed their fire shelters. Updated information from the U.S. Forest Service is slightly different from what was originally released shortly after the incident. Andrew Madsen, an information officer for the fire, explained that of the 14 that were entrapped, three were flown to Community Regional Hospital in Fresno. One was initially in critical condition and the other two were in serious condition. As of today, September 11, the two that were serious have been released, and the critically injured individual is much better and is expected to be released in a day or two. Mr. Madsen said some of the other 11 members of the crew had “smoke inhalation” issues, but were evaluated at the scene and are OK. The crew was attempting to protect the Forest Service’s Nacimiento Fire station as the blaze approached.
Nacimiento Station, satellite photo, September 7, 2018.
Using a rule of thumb to predict how fast a wildfire will spread
September 10, 2020 | 9:42 p.m. PDT
Hot-Dry-Windy Index for Oregon’s Willamette Valley, calculated for September 9, 2020. Day -2 is the actual HDWI for September 7, the day of the wind event in Oregon.
People may wonder why all of a sudden there were numerous very large fires in Oregon this week during what I am calling the Siege of ’20.
To a degree it didn’t exactly happen suddenly; some of the fires had been burning for weeks. Two of the largest, the Beachie Creek and Lionshead Fires, started from lightning on August 16.
The fires in Oregon were all heavily influenced by a historic extreme wind event on Monday, September 7 that brought 25 to 50 mph winds to many areas. Power lines and trees were toppled and any existing fires or just a spark could escalate into a raging fire quickly. Four fires east of Interstate 5 from Portland south to Eugene are each now larger than 100,000 acres. Just one 100,000-acre fire in Oregon is rare, but to have four at once is unprecedented in recent decades.
These fires and others in Oregon, California, and Colorado are crying out for firefighters, engines, helicopters, and air tankers but the fire suppression infrastructure available falls far short of the present need. This means that after the wind subsides, putting the blazes out quickly is not realistic. But when fires are moving with a strong wind, nothing can be done to stop them. Wednesday in southern California thousands of residents were under evacuation warnings due to the Bobcat Fire that was threatening seven high density communities in the wildland-urban interface of the Los Angeles area. Firefighters were only able to get access to one water-dropping helicopter, and for just part of the day. Normally there would have been a dozen helicopters assisting firefighters.
Drought Index September 1, 2020.
It was not just the extreme wind in Oregon and the shortage of firefighting resources that caused the fires to grow so quickly. Much of the state is in severe to extreme drought along with Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado. The northern two-thirds of California is in moderate to extreme drought and there has been little rain in many of these areas during the last two months. This results in the moisture content of the vegetation (or fuel) being low, making it more receptive to igniting and burning more quickly and intensely than if conditions were closer to average.
When fires are burning in vegetation that has not been visited by fire for decades, the amount of biomass and dead material that has accumulated increases the intensity of a fire as well as its resistance to control — literally adding fuel to the (next) fire. The areas where the four megafires are burning in the Cascade Mountain Range east of Interstate 5 have virtually no recorded history of fires.
The three components that dictate how a wildfire burns are weather, fuel (vegetation), and topography. There is one subcategory of weather that outranks all of the other factors for the amount of influence it has on how rapidly a fire moves — wind. Sophisticated models run on computers can calculate the projected rate of spread of a vegetation fire, or you could use the rule of thumb which works surprisingly well when you have dry fuels and strong winds. That “rule” says, the rate of spread of a fire is roughly equal to 10 percent of the average wind speed measured in an open area. Researchers have studied this. But keep in mind there are MANY variables that affect the spread of a fire, so this thumb rule is just a wild-ass guess, but it can be a starting point to get an idea of how fast a fire can move when it’s windy.
Using the rule of thumb on the fires that spread exponentially on September 7 in Oregon, if there was an average wind speed of 25 mph, that would spread a fire at about 2.5 miles each hour.
Here are more facts about the conditions that contributed to the Siege of ’20.
The Hot-Dry-Windy Index (HDW) on September 7 (see chart above) was well above the 95th percentile. It was much hotter, drier, and windy than average for the date and location, which means the conditions favored the rapid spread of fires. The HDW is very simple and only considers the atmospheric factors of heat, moisture, and wind. To be more precise, it is a multiplication of the maximum wind speed and maximum vapor pressure deficit (VPD) in the lowest 50 or so millibars in the atmosphere. The products, displayed as charts, show the index for the preceding 10 days and the forecast for the next 7 days.
Weather observations, 100-hour Time Lag Fuels, September 9, 2020.
Dead vegetation absorbs moisture from humid air, or dries out when the humidity is low, and this affects the rate of spread of a wildfire. The moisture content of the dead vegetation in Oregon this week, the 100-hour time lag fuel (1″ to 3″ in diameter), has been low; less than 10 percent, and in some areas, below 5 percent. The lower the fuel moisture, the faster a fire spreads. Kiln-dried lumber is usually at about 12 percent.
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