The Chetco Bar Fire on July 13, 2017 taken from a helicopter during the Type 3 Incident Commander’s first recon flight.
Two lawsuits have been filed in federal court for firing operations that burned private land during the Chetco Bar Fire that eventually burned more than 191,000 acres on land managed by the US Forest Service and private landowners in southwest Oregon.
The suit, under the Tucker Act for inverse condemnation, seeks compensation for “property taken” by the USFS in its use and management of the Chetco Bar Fire. It alleges that between August 17 and 20, 2017 the USFS conducted firing operations on their property “to achieve its natural resource management objectives, and to otherwise manage its lands”.
“USFS employed planned ignitions in the form of large-scale backfires designed to artificially grow the naturally occurring wildfire to sizes much larger than if it has been left to burn naturally,” say the twocomplaints filed October 21. “The large-scale planned ignitions on the Chetco Bar Fire ignored political and property boundaries and used Plaintiffs’ nonfederal resources as backfire fuel, imposing the costs of the natural resource management objectives upon Plaintiffs.”
The Chetco Bar Fire started from a lightning strike during a storm on June 24 and 25, 2017 and was first reported by an airline pilot 17 days later on July 12.
The attorney representing the landowners is Quentin Rhodes in Missoula, who is not your typical barrister. He worked as a wildland firefighter for eight seasons between 1987 and 1994, serving on the Helena Hotshot crew and later as a smokejumper at West Yellowstone and Missoula. He told Wildfire Today in 2012 that he was in the first planeload of jumpers on the South Canyon Fire in Colorado in 1994, the fatal fire on which 14 wildland firefighters were entrapped and killed. In 2012 he represented owners of a Montana ranch who won a $750,000 judgement against the state of Montana when firefighters on the Ryan Gulch Fire employed firing operations which burned 900 acres of the ranch’s land.
A partial history of fires in Northwest California and Southwest Oregon, 2000 through Sept 17, 2020.
The Northwest California/Southwest Oregon area has kept firefighters very busy at times during the last 20 years, as you can see on the map above.
A new fire is rapidly putting itself into that history. The Slater Fire reported September 8 grew to 89,000 acres by September 9 and has now spread to 150,000 acres. That growth, however, has slowed in the last several days.
It started northeast of Happy Camp, California and ran north into Oregon then took a left and crossed Highway 199. It has come to within about four miles of the 2002 Biscuit Fire.
If recent fire history is any indication, the Slater Fire may not even slow down when and if it reaches the Biscuit burn, and of course it depends on the weather, which has moderated this week. The 2017 Chetco Bar Fire and the 2018 Klondike Fire burned for miles into the then 17 or 18-year old fire scar. The entire eastern two-thirds of the Chetco Bar Fire was in the footprint.
Strong winds that drove the dozens of fires September 8 in Oregon are not super rare. The Klondike Fire west of Grants Pass started July 15, 2018. In early October it had become virtually dormant, but a few hot spots were revitalized by an east wind event on the 14th. According to an article in the Mail Tribune the suddenly vigorous fire was transporting burning embers that started spot fires six miles out ahead of the flaming front:
“Extreme spotting” propelled fine embers up to six miles ahead of the main fire, dropping the live ash right between firefighters’ tents and close to people’s homes.
“We even had to move our own fire camp,” [information officer Kale] Casey said.
So if the weather this year is anything like it was two years ago, firefighters could be busy in the area for at least another month.
In a comment on the earlier post about the Hot-Dry-Windy Index (HDW), Brian Potter, a research meteorologist with the U.S. Forest Service, offered to provide some preliminary results looking at how HDW performed during the 2017 Chetco Bar Fire in Oregon, as well as how the Haines index performed during that fire.
The HDW is a new tool developed for firefighters to predict weather conditions which can affect the spread of wildfires. It is described as being very simple and only considers the atmospheric factors of heat, moisture, and wind.
Mr. Potter has provided three figures showing the weather indices computed from the National Weather Service’s NAM model analyses. Because they use a different model from the HDW website, he does not have historic percentile values for HDW, but they are illustrative, nonetheless. These are preliminary data and have not been through peer review or evaluation.
Here is a graph of HDW values compared to growth on the Chetco Bar Fire:
Here are the Haines Index values for the mid-elevation version of the Index:
And the high elevation version of the Haines Index:
Mr. Potter said he has some thoughts about the graphs, but is interested in hearing what others take away from them.
The Chetco Bar Fire in southwest Oregon started July 12, 2017 and burned over 191,000 acres.
Map showing the location of the Chetco Bar Fire (on the left) in southwest Oregon, October 2, 2017. USFS.
Above: The Chetco Bar Fire on July 13, 2017, day two, as seen from a helicopter during the Type 3 Incident Commander’s first recon flight.
Originally published at 10:47 a.m. MDT October 2, 2017.
In mid-August when the Chetco Bar Fire in southwest Oregon quadrupled in size during a four-day period from 22,042 to 97,758 acres, some began wondering, in comments on this site and other venues, why the U.S. Forest Service did not suppress it soon after it was reported by a commercial airline pilot at 2:42 p.m. July 12.
Since it started the fire has burned 191,090 acres and cost taxpayers almost $61 million.
Map showing the location of the Chetco Bar Fire (on the left) October 2, 2017. USFS.
The USFS has released a high tech timeline presentation that highlights some of the decisions and events that occurred during the course of the fire. It is embedded at the bottom of this article. Some of the interactive map features may not work — if that is the case, you can view it the USFS website.
The fire started from a lightning strike during a storm on June 24 and 25 and was spotted by the airline pilot 17 days later. The timeline does not mention if infrared flights or any other detection methods were used that possibly could have resulted in an initial attack on the fire soon after it started rather than more than two weeks later.
A fixed wing Air Attack ship was dispatched after the airliner pilot’s report. Air Attack recommended dispatching a Single Engine Air Tanker (SEAT), a helicopter for water bucket support, and inserting rappellers. At that time the fire had burned about half an acre.
The first four firefighters rappelled into the area an hour and 32 minutes after the first report. Three helicopters dropped 17,280 gallons of water on the fire that afternoon and evening until after 9 p.m., but no air tankers worked the fire until a SEAT made two drops on the second day, July 13. While the helicopters dropped water, the four firefighters built a helispot. At the end of the first day Air Attack reported the fire was holding at three-quarters of an acre.
On day two a second load of four rappellers was sent to the fire. Below is an excerpt from the USFS timeline, and following that, the high-tech timeline:
“[On day two, July 13, the second load of four rappellers] were given a briefing, then loaded in the helicopter at 9 a.m. to fly the 20 minutes to the fire location. From the air, the fire appeared to have grown to about 10 acres overnight, with a few areas of isolated smoke columns. The crew noted the steep ground, the old burn scar and the fact the fire was burning mid-slope. They could see a lot of rollout (burning debris rolling below the main fire). Due to the remoteness of the area and the steep topography, the crew requested a few more orbits around the fire to gather more intelligence from the high vantage point.
“Upon landing, their perspective changed. “The ground was really, really steep. We know views from the air can be deceiving, but we couldn’t see the fire or the smoke from the helispot. I originally thought the trees below the helispot were reproduction from an old fire, but then I realized the slope was so steep I was only seeing the tree tops. They were actually 200 foot tall, 4-foot DBH (diameter at breast height) trees,” said a senior firefighter on the second load of rappellers.
“One rappeller began scouting for an escape route along the ridge to the north of the helispot, and found extremely dense vegetation with manzanita, tan oak and madrone, along with dead and downed logs. The ground was covered with madrone leaves that were slick – combined with the steep terrain, it made staying upright a challenge.
Oregon Army National Guard Soldiers during a firefighting training exercise at the Oregon Department of Public Safety Standards and Training in Salem, Oregon, August 28, 2017.
The U.S. Forest Service distributed this photo on Twitter September 17 that shows at least 90 Oregon Army National Guard Soldiers during a firefighting training exercise at the Oregon Department of Public Safety Standards and Training in Salem, Oregon, August 28, 2017.
Nearly 125 Citizen-Soldiers from the 41st Infantry Brigade Combat Team volunteered to join the second iteration of personnel, also known as NG-2, activated by Governor Kate Brown to assist with wildfires across the state of Oregon. The Oregon National Guard is currently assigned to three fires in central and southern Oregon; the Whitewater, High Cascades Complex, and Chetco Bar fires. (Photo by Sgt. 1st Class April Davis, Oregon Military Department Public Affairs)
The satellite photo shows smoke from vegetation fires in the northwestern United States on August 31, 2017. The red dots represent heat detected by a satellite at 4:18 a.m. MDT September 1, 2017.
