Another fire, north of Beatty, OR, has burned more than 600 acres
7:49 a.m. PDT June 3, 2021
Map showing heat detected on a fire in the Columbia River Gorge June 2, 2021.
A fire in the Columbia River Gorge Wednesday afternoon forced the evacuation of a mobile home park and the temporary closure of Interstate 84 and Highway 30 in northern Oregon.
The fire two miles northwest of The Dalles, Oregon was suppressed by Mid-Columbia Fire and Rescue and the US Forest Service.
Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that the Pine Wood Mobile Manor community, the Columbia River Gorge Discovery Center, and a nearby golf course were evacuated for several hours.
A spokesperson from the USFS said the fire burned about 120 acres.
In 2017 the Eagle Creek Fire burned 48,831 acres in the Columbia River Gorge. Most of the fire was on the Oregon side of the river but a burning ember started a spot fire on the Washington side which was quickly extinguished. The fire required the extended closure of Interstate 84, forced hundreds to evacuate, and poured smoke into Portland. A judge ordered the teen who started it to pay restitution totaling $36.6 million.
Fire in Columbia River Gorge, June 2, 2021. USFS photo.
Another fire 18 miles north of Beatty, Oregon, has burned 679 acres. The Sycan River Fire was being managed by a Type 3 Incident Management Team but the number of personnel assigned has been reduced from 150 to 13.
Firefighters are mopping up the 34-acre Yellow Jacket Fire 4 miles south of Beatty.
An analysis of the Labor Day 2020 wildfires in Oregon determined that the combination of high temperatures, unusually dry fuels, and strong winds occurring at the same time was unprecedented in the area.
That flammable combination led to an unprecedented number of acres burned in the Oregon Cascades, about 11 percent of the mountain range, and more than the previous 36 years combined.
“Several very large fires in western Oregon spread rapidly during an unusually strong offshore wind event that commenced on Labor Day in 2020. The Labor Day fires burned more area of the Oregon Cascades than had burned in the previous 36 years combined and very likely exceeded the area burned in any single year for at least the past 120 years. The fires damaged over 4,000 structures, led to several fatalities, placed over 10% of the state’s residents under some level of evacuation advisory, and contributed to the hazardous air quality across the Northwestern United States.
“A compound set of weather-related factors leading up to and during the fires facilitated these extreme fires. Unusually warm conditions with limited precipitation in the 60-days leading up to the fires allowed for fuels to become particularly dry and combustible by early September. Downslope offshore winds materialized during September 7–9, 2020 across the Oregon Cascades bringing exceptionally strong winds and dry air that drove rapid rates of fire spread. While neither of these individual factors was unprecedented, the concurrence of these drivers created conditions unmatched in the observational record.”
The authors called that the “Plain Language Summary.” To drill down even more into Plain Language, the conditions in Oregon were hot, dry, and windy.
The Hot-Dry-Windy Index (HDWI) is a new tool 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. 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. It does not consider fuel moisture.
In preliminary data that had not been peer reviewed when we wrote about it February 20, 2019, the HDWI was far more useful than the Haines Index in predicting the growth of the Chetco Bar Fire which burned over 191,000 acres in Southwest Oregon in July, 2017.
The HDWI for Oregon’s Willamette Valley was far above the 95th percentile September 6-9, 2020. During the 10 days prior to September 9 it was above the 90th percentile on nine days. The strong winds occurred September 7-9, and most of the growth of the Labor Day fires was during that period.
Hot-Dry-Windy Index for Oregon’s Willamette Valley for the 10 days prior to September 9, 2020, and projected for September 9-15.GOES-17 photo of smoke from wildfires in Washington, Oregon, and California at 5:56 p.m. PDT Sept. 8, 2020. The photo was taken during a very strong wind event.
Beaver dam. Wyoming Game and Fish Department photo.
When Paul Stewart bought his rangeland in Eastern Oregon in 1884 it included a meadow with “stirrup-high native grasses”. The sub-irrigation provided by Crane Creek was amplified by several families of industrious beavers who had built numerous dams across the stream to form ponds for their homes.
In 1924 he left his farm for a year and upon returning found that poachers had trapped and removed the beavers. The dams had washed out and over the next 12 years the meadow and the creek was transformed. Uncontrolled flood waters eroded the banks, cutting into his valuable crop land. The stream was flowing 15 feet below its original level and the water table had dropped. The meadow was drying up and a well was barely producing any water.
Mr. Stewart arranged for the Oregon State Game Commission to bring him sixteen of nature’s hydraulic engineers — native beavers.
Below is an excerpt from a document written in 1941 by Paul W. Schaffer, the Regional Biologist for the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Region.
“The beavers began their reclamation work at once. They erected strong dams almost overnight; they sent huge cottonwoods and aspen crashing into the gully; they built more and more dams.
“When the heavy spring run-off came, water that for the past twelve years had rushed through the stream channel to be lost in the river below was caught behind the beaver dams and stored in large ponds which acted as settling basins for the silt-laden waters. At each flood stage of the stream, inches of soil were added to the bottom of the deepened channel. As the ponds were filled, excess water flowed over well-designed spillways and continued down the stream.”
The average summer streamflow of the preceding twelve years was increased considerably by the water escaping from storage. Water from the ponds percolated into the banks to the adjacent fields. Hay production in the meadows improved. The well again supplied ample stock water. The ugly erosion scar through the meadow was healing.
To make a long story shorter, Mr. Stewart’s downstream neighbor, Lloyd Johnson, urged Mr. Stewart to remove the beaver dams thinking it would improve the condition of his own eroded land. He did not realize that if the dams were blown up that the water would simply flow through his land, unimpeded by any structures, resulting in little if any change in his water table.
Mr. Johnson filed a lawsuit to have the beaver dams removed. He won. The judge ordered Mr. Stewart to within five days ask the State Game Commission to remove the beavers and the dams. He was also ordered to pay a $300 contempt fine and was threatened with three months in jail if he did not comply.
Mr. Stewart appealed to the Oregon Supreme Court which ruled in his favor, writing in part:
“To deny our water users the right to control such streams and prevent the erosion that would soon take place would mean the utter destruction of much of our most valuable lands throughout the state.”
Below is Mr. Schaffer’s nine-page beautifully written and typed description of Mr. Stewart’s experience with the beavers, crafted in 1941. It even includes an epilogue. Notice how both the right and left margins are justified, a long and tedious process when done on a typewriter. (You may also download the document.)
If you’re still starving for more information about beavers, Heidi Perryman, Co-Chair of last month’s California Beaver Summit, tells us that their website has information about presentations made at the conference, including the effects on wildfires, managing the challenges beavers can cause for landowners, and the value beaver engineering can have for the drying state of California. She said two of the researchers mentioned in our May 5 article, Dr. Emily Fairfax and Dr. Joe Wheaton, gave keynote talks at the conference. There were also speakers from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, US Forest Service, and Bureau of Land Management.
Thanks and a tip of the hat go out to Kelly for letting us know about this case.
Lower income applicants were about four times more likely to be denied than those with higher incomes
Devastation from the Almeda Drive Fire near Phoenix and Talent in southern Oregon. Screenshot from video shot by Jackson County on September 8, 2020.
Jefferson Public Radio has an article by April Ehrlich who reported that after the disastrous wildfires in Oregon in 2020 the Federal Emergency Management Agency denied about 57 percent of the 27,000 applications for federal assistance.
As an example, a woman who had lived in her home since 2012 was denied help because, as the letter from FEMA said, “You are not eligible for housing assistance because you did not prove you lived in the damaged home at the time of the disaster.” The homeowner, Maria Meunier, is one of the 14,000 Oregonians whose applications were not approved, but she is one of only 290 people who appealed the denials. Only 40 of the appeals were approved, but Ms. Meunier’s was not one of them.
Below is an excerpt from the article at Jefferson Public Radio:
Left out
Oregon’s high rates of denial are on par with previous natural disasters. FEMA denied about 60% of Puerto Rican disaster assistance applicants after Hurricane Maria. A study by Texas Hausers, a housing nonprofit, found that FEMA denied a quarter of disaster applicants after Hurricane Harvey hit there.
Many of the people who have been denied assistance are low-income. Among Hurricane Harvey applicants, people whose annual incomes were below $15,000 had a 46% denial rate. People with annual incomes exceeding $70,000 had a 10% denial rate.
JPR has a pending data request with FEMA to obtain income and demographic information about Oregon applicants who were impacted by wildfires in 2020.
Following Oregon’s wildfires, FEMA issued press releases encouraging people to appeal. They said the appeals process could be as simple as correcting a typo or providing a missing document.
Disaster victim advocates and legal aid attorneys say appealing FEMA’s denials is anything but simple; and that by denying so many people the first time, the agency is using a complex bureaucratic process to weed out people who likely need the most help.
“People who’ve been affected by a disaster are dealing with trauma,” said attorney Tracy Figueroa with Texas RioGrande Legal Aid. “They’re trying to pull the documents together, and just hearing “no” from one entity or another can shut things down. They don’t know how to navigate the bureaucracy. They’re just done.”
Figueroa and other legal aid attorneys say applicants almost always need an attorney to help them find and deliver documents, provide context for their living situations, and continually follow up with FEMA representatives.
People with limited resources are less likely to have access to a lawyer. Disaster-prone states like Texas, where Figueroa has worked through 18 federal disasters, have teams of legal aid attorneys that help low-income disaster victims. But in states like Oregon, which rarely sees a disaster as destructive as the Almeda Fire, there are few private or nonprofit attorneys who are experienced in FEMA disaster assistance.
FEMA’s denial letters aren’t always clear about how applicants can amend their applications. For example, several Oregon applicants told JPR that they were denied assistance because they have homeowner’s insurance; a common misunderstanding, since FEMA often lists homeowners insurance as a reason for denial. Rather, FEMA can help people with homeowners insurance, but those applicants need to follow a few other steps first. They need to see what their insurance will cover and provide that documentation to FEMA, then they need to apply for a loan through the Small Business Administration, even if they don’t intend to take out a loan. At that point, they could go back to FEMA with an appeal.
Challenges with mobile homes
Jackson County officials say two-thirds of the homes destroyed by the Almeda Fire were manufactured homes. Like Meunier, mobile homeowners face a number of challenges in applying for disaster assistance. They need to provide months-long proof that they paid space rent, a copy of their lease agreement and a title to their home, which isn’t always available because of the generally informal process of buying a mobile home.
“For people who are living in mobile homes, they may not have those title documents,” said Sarah Saadian of the Low Income Housing Coalition. “Even if your state may require you to register it, it just doesn’t happen like that. Sometimes the park owner might have it. Sometimes it’s never delivered when the home is delivered.”
Saadian and the Low Income Housing Coalition are encouraging FEMA and Congress to enact legislation that allows mobile homeowners to self-certify homeownership in lieu of title documents, a process that had been allowed after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico. FEMA only allows self-attestation in U.S. territories, not in the states.
Mobile home parks have historically been located in areas that are susceptible to natural disasters, including wildfires and hurricanes.
“They’re in areas where wildfires occur and where flooding can occur because they’re tucked away,” said attorney Ilene Jacobs with the California Rural Legal Assistance. “Some of them are quite substandard and are in areas adjacent to a highway.”
The Almeda Fire burned through the Bear Creek Greenway, a riparian area and bike path running along the Interstate 5 freeway. Several manufactured home parks abutted the greenway and freeway before the fire raged through those properties.
Map of fires in northwest Oregon, September 13, 2020, while the fires were still spreading.
FEMA has begun moving Manufactured Housing Units (MHUs) onto a newly constructed site in Mill City, Oregon that will provide temporary housing for qualified wildfire survivors and their families.
Several communities southeast of Salem along Highway 22 suffered severe impacts from the Beachie Creek and Lionshead Fires which grew large during the wind event of September 7 and 8, 2020. Some of the worst hit towns were Mill City and Gates.
Construction on the new Mill City site began earlier this month, with work completed ahead of schedule. The site is currently scheduled to receive 13 manufactured housing units (MHUs) and can accommodate up to 16 MHUs, providing necessary temporary housing for the qualified residents of both Linn and Marion counties.
As soon as all MHU are delivered and placed on site, each unit will be given a final inspection ensuring they are ready for occupancy, and families will be scheduled to move into their temporary homes.
To date, 85 families whose homes were severely damaged or destroyed by this year’s wildfires have been approved for temporary housing units. These units are placed in established RV parks or in FEMA constructed group sites.
In addition to Linn and Marion counties, FEMA’s Direct Housing mission is establishing temporary housing for qualified disaster survivors in Jackson and Lincoln counties in sites like the one in Mill City. Housing units are chosen by FEMA based on the survivor family composition and needs, as well as to ensure that requirements for access or functional needs are met.
Currently, 240 qualified families are scheduled to receive FEMA Direct Temporary Housing in the four counties. The current number of qualified families has fallen as many households that qualified for this assistance have located alternate temporary or permanent housing on their own.
Other programs for fire victims such as rental assistance may be available. Apply online at DisasterAssistance.gov, by downloading the FEMA app, or by calling the disaster assistance helpline at 800-621-3362 from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. PDT, seven days a week.
Would grant access to 26,000 acres for $1.35/month per animal
Booking photos of Dwight and Steven Hammond (Photos: U.S. Department of Justice)
The Bureau of Land Management is proposing to issue four grazing permits to the Oregon-based Hammond Ranch which for 10 years would allow them access to 26,000 acres of taxpayers’ land for $1.35 per animal unit month.
On September 30, 2001 the two Hammonds distributed boxes of matches to everyone in their hunting party with instructions to“light up the whole country on fire”. Initially they ignited fires on their property but the fires spread onto 139 acres of federal land.
Steven Hammond was also convicted of setting a series of fires on August 22, 2006. Those ignitions, during Red Flag Warning conditions, compromised the safety of firefighters who were working on another fire nearby. Some of them were forced to retreat from the area for their own safety. They were given advice and led to safety via radio by an orbiting Air Attack.
The Hammond case inspired the 40-day armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. Robert LaVoy Finicum, one of the occupiers died, but brothers Ammon and Ryan Bundy, the accused leaders of the occupation, were not convicted.
Anyone can protest the BLM’s proposed decision by sending a letter, by January 13, 2020, to:
Don Rotell
Field Manager, Andrews/Steens Resource Areas
Burns District BLM
28910 Hwy 20 W.
Hines, OR 97738
Below is a press release from the Western Watersheds Project about the proposed grazing permit.
January 4, 2021
BURNS, Ore. – In the very last moments of 2020, the Bureau of Land Management issued a proposed decision to award grazing privileges to Hammonds Ranches, Inc., despite the history of abuses of grazing privileges by these public land’s ranchers—including actions leading to arson convictions. The BLM notified interested parties of the decision on New Year’s Day, a federal holiday.
“Giving the permit to the Hammonds shows a flagrant disregard for the rule of law, both by the former permittees and by Secretary Bernhardt, and is clearly a political move rather than a responsible allocation of public lands,” said Erik Molvar, Executive Director of Western Watersheds Project. “There is a documented history of permit violations, criminal convictions, and overgrazing of allotments as recently as 2019.”
The proposed grazing decision was posted late in the day on December 31, 2020, and the online planning site states that the Hammonds Ranches, Inc. “will be apportioned preference due to their extensive historic use of these allotments, past proper use of rangeland resources, a high level of general need, and advantages conferred by topography.” The Hammonds past “proper” use of the allotments has included arson, unauthorized livestock use, overgrazing, and alleged intimidation of federal employees. Just six years ago, the Bureau of Land Management refused to reissue the same permits because, “The Hammonds’ malicious disregard for human life and public property shows contempt for BLM regulation of public lands.”
“It’s reminiscent of Secretary Ryan Zinke’s decision to give the Hammonds permits on his very last day in office on January 2, 2019,” said Sarah McMillan, Conservation Director for WildEarth Guardians. “That decision was unlawful and rightly overturned by the courts. With one foot out the door, the Trump Administration is trying, again, to allow these bad-actor permittees to run roughshod over public lands.”
