“This is not an emergency for us. This is what we do”.
(Deputy Incident Commander Rob Allen during a Wednesday morning briefing to firefighters, emphasizing that they should not feel pressure to take unnecessary chances performing what is to them routine work for which they have spent years accumulating skills and experience.)
The above quote can be heard in the brief video below.
All of the fires comprising the Chelan Complex of Fires grew on Tuesday, adding about 6,000 acres to what became a total of 69,445 acres burned. The Black Canyon and McFarland Fires burned together (see map below) while expanding on almost all the length of their perimeters. The First Creek and Antoine Fires both spread on their northwest sides.
The red lines indicate the perimeters of the Chelan area fires mapped at 11 p.m. PT August 18, 2015. The white lines are from about 24 hours before. (click to enlarge)
Evacuations are still in place for approximately 2,900 residents in the greater Chelan area.
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(UPDATED at 3:04 p.m. PT, August 18, 2015)
Map of Chelan area fires, 9 p.m. PT, August 17, 2015. The red line is the most current. The white line is from 1-2 days before.
Monday night the assessors office confirmed that 35 residences and 21 outbuildings have been destroyed in the fire near Chelan, Washington. The surveys are not complete and those numbers could be revised upward in the next few days.
The Sheriff’s office is increasing the patrols in evacuated areas, hoping to stop the looting has been reported in the temporarily vacant homes.
The Cougar Creek Fire burns near Mt. Adams in Washington, August 12, 2015. Photo by Jerry Messinger.
Jerry Messinger sent us these photos of the Cougar Creek Fire six miles northwest of Glenwood, Washington. The fire has burned 9,400 acres and is being managed by Washington Interagency Incident Management Team #5 (WIIMT5), Incident Commander Dave Leitch.
The Cougar Creek Fire in Washington, August 12, 2015. Photo by Jerry Messinger. He said this was taken in the morning, and the fire activity increased in the afternoon.
Smoke from the Wolverine Fire in north-central Washington travels into Idaho and northern Montana Sunday afternoon. (click to enlarge)
Smoke from the Wolverine Fire in north-central Washington is creating some concern in northern Montana. Some residents smelling the smoke that is blowing into Idaho and Montana are assuming the fire is nearby, but it is actually 300 to 600 miles away, depending on where you are in Montana. Some people in the state are searching for phrases on the internet such as “current Montana wildfire”.
At this time, there are no large, active fires in Montana, except for the Reynolds Fire in Glacier National Park which occasionally sends up a burst of smoke when a patch of vegetation burns out. Some residents in the state could be smelling that as well, since it was putting up some smoke on Sunday and merging with the Wolverine Fire smoke.
Below are two smoke maps. The first documents the distribution of wildfire smoke as of 4 p.m. MT, August 2. The next is a forecast for smoke at 8 p.m. MT, August 2.
Map of wildfire smoke at 4 p.m. MT, August 2, 2015.Smoke forecast for 8 p.m. MT, August 8, 2015.
To see the most current smoke reports on Wildfire Today, visit the articles tagged “smoke” at https://wildfiretoday.com/tag/smoke/
Wolverine Fire Aug 1, 2015. Photo by Mario Isaias-Vera.
Since we last reported on the Wolverine Fire on Lake Chelan in northern Washington August 3 it has grown by about 2,000 acres to 26,614, according to data from a 12:09 a.m. mapping flight on Thursday.
Map of Wolverine Fire (in red) at 12:09 a.m. August 6, 2015. The yellow line was the perimeter on August 3.
Scroll down to see other maps.
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(UPDATED at 2:20 p.m. PT, August 3, 2015)
3-D map showing the perimeter (in red) of the Wolverine Fire, looking northwest at 3 a.m. PT, August 3, 2015. The yellow line was the perimeter the previous day. The lake is Chelan.
The Wolverine Fire in north-central Washington grew by more than 8,000 acres on Sunday and has now burned about 24,500 acres. Most of the fire’s spread was on the south and west sides. It progressed a mile and a half up the Railroad Creek drainage on the west side and about three miles on the southwest side in the Clone Creek and Tumble Creek drainages. The fire perimeters are on the map above. Scroll down to see other maps of the fire.
Some of the peaks where the fire is burning now reach over a mile above Lake Chelan, the east boundary of the fire. Hopefully the firefighters will not be ferried by boat up the lake to the fire and have to hike to the ridge tops, like we did on the El Cariso Hotshots on the Safety Harbor Fire in that area in 1970. Going down, weeks later, we got a ride in a helicopter. I would have preferred it to be reversed. Fly up, walk down.
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(Originally published at 3:29 p.m. PT, August 2, 2015)
Fire activity on the Wolverine Fire, July 3, 2014. InciWeb photo.
The Wolverine Fire near the north end of Lake Chelan in north-central Washington slowly grew since it started on June 29 to 3,714 acres on July 31. That changed the next day when it more than quadrupled to 15,760 acres. (See the maps below.) After burning for more than a month, suddenly Level 3 evacuations were ordered for Holden Village and Holden Mine Remediation, which meant there was no time to grab anything — leave immediately. The evacuation was accomplished through a combined effort of Holden Village, Rio Tinto, Lake Chelan Boat Company, Chelan County Sheriff’s Office, and the US Forest Service. The incident management team provided more information:
Holden Village is not threatened but a Level 3 evacuation was necessary as Lucerne Landing was in danger which is the evacuation route for the Village.
A Level 3 evacuation has also been ordered for Lucerne, Riddle and Lightning Creek.
Sunday morning a Type 2 incident management team assumed command of the Wolverine Fire. They will be relieved Tuesday by a Type 1 team.
The Wolverine Fire has spread throughout the Burn Creek, South Lake Creek, and Forks Creek drainages and is well established in the Emerald Park Creek drainage.
It is on the 45-mile-long Lake Chelan, 23 air miles southwest of Twisp and 30 miles northwest of the city of Chelan.
Click on the maps below to see larger versions.
Map of the Wolverine Fire. The red line was the perimeter at 8 p.m. PT August 1, 2015. The white line is from 24 hours before.
The Fire Effects crew from North Cascades National Park is seen in this time-lapse video filmed over a two-hour period placing fire monitoring plots just outside fire perimeter of the Paradise Fire in Olympic National Park.
The fire that started May 15 in the Olympic peninsula rain forest has burned 1,781 acres.
I wonder to what degree the intensive human activity in the plot while establishing it affects the results.
As mountain pine beetles and other insects chew their way through Western forests, forest fires might not seem far behind. Lands covered by dead trees appear ready to burst into flame.
However, an analysis of wildfire extent in Oregon and Washington over the past 30 years shows very little difference in the likelihood of fires in forests with and without insect damage. Indeed, other factors – drought, storms, and fuel accumulation from years of fire suppression – may be more important than insects in determining if fire is more or less likely from year to year.
Scientists reached this conclusion by mapping the locations of insect outbreaks and wildfires throughout Oregon and Washington beginning in 1970. Researchers discovered that the chances of fire in forests with extensive swaths of dead timber are neither higher nor lower than in forests without damage from mountain pine beetles.
The same comparison done on forests damaged by another insect – western spruce budworm – yields a different result. The chances of wildfire actually appear to be slightly lower where the budworm has defoliated and killed trees in the past. While the mechanics of such an association are unconfirmed, it’s possible that budworm outbreaks could reduce the risk of wildfire by consuming needles in the forest canopy.
“Our analysis suggests that wildfire likelihood does not increase following most insect outbreaks,” said Garrett Meigs, lead author of a paper published this week in the open-access journal Ecosphere. Meigs is a former Ph.D. student in the Oregon State University College of Forestry and now a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Vermont.
Across more than 49 million forested acres in both states, insects and fires typically affect less than 2 percent of the land in a given year. More forestland is usually disturbed by insects than by fire.
“Most forests have plenty of fuel already,” Meigs said. “Green trees burn, not always as readily as dead ones, but they burn. The effects of insects are trumped by other factors such as drought, wind and fire management.” For example, the 2002 Biscuit Fire, the region’s largest at nearly 500,000 acres, occurred in an area with little tree damage from insects.
“Even if mountain pine beetle outbreaks do alter fuels in a way that increases flammability, the windows of opportunity are too small – and fire is too rare – for those effects to manifest at landscape and regional scales.”
“In the case of the budworm, our findings suggest that there may be a natural thinning effect of insect-caused defoliation and mortality, and it is possible that insects are doing some ‘fuel reduction’ work that managers may not need to replicate,” said Meigs. That possibility needs more research, he added.
These results are consistent with other studies that have investigated the likelihood of fire across the West. For example, a 2015 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by University of Colorado scientists found that despite extensive outbreaks of mountain pine beetles in the Rockies and the Cascades, fires in recent years were no more likely to occur in beetle-killed forests than in forests not affected by the insects.
Public perception may reflect our experience with starting campfires, said John Bailey, Oregon State professor of forestry and co-author of the Ecosphere paper.
“We choose dead and dry wood for kindling, not green branches,” Bailey pointed out. “A dead branch with lots of red needles is ideal. At the scale of a forest, however, the burning process is different. Wildland fire during severe weather conditions burns less discriminately across mountainsides.”
For managers of forestlands, these results suggest that emphasis needs to be put on fuel reduction, forests near communities and on preserving ecosystem services such as biodiversity and water quality. “Forests will continue to burn whether or not there was prior insect activity,” Meigs and his co-authors write, “and known drivers like fuel accumulation and vegetation stress likely will play a more important role in a warmer, potentially drier future.”
In addition to Bailey, Meigs’ co-authors included John L. Campbell, Harold S. J. Zald, David C. Shaw and Robert E. Kennedy, all of Oregon State. Funding support was provided by the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship Program and the USDA Forest Service.
