2A — THE OBSERVER
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2019
LOCAL
D aily
P lanner
TODAY
Today is Monday, Nov.
25, the 329th day of 2019.
There are 36 days left in the
year.
TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT
On Nov. 25, 2016, Fidel
Castro, who led his rebels
to victorious revolution in
1959, embraced Soviet-style
communism and defied the
power of 10 U.S. presidents
during his half-century of
rule in Cuba, died at age 90.
ON THIS DATE
In 1783, the British evacu-
ated New York during the
Revolutionary War.
In 1914, baseball Hall of
Famer Joe DiMaggio was
born in Martinez, California.
In 1915, a new version of
the Ku Klux Klan, targeting
blacks, Jews, Catholics and
immigrants, was founded by
William Joseph Simmons.
In 1947, movie studio
executives meeting in New
York agreed to blacklist the
“Hollywood Ten” who’d
been cited for contempt of
Congress the day before.
In 1980, Sugar Ray
Leonard regained the
World Boxing Council
welterweight champion-
ship when Roberto Duran
abruptly quit in the eighth
round at the Louisiana
Superdome.
In 1999, Elian Gonzalez, a
5-year-old Cuban boy, was
rescued by a pair of sport
fishermen off the coast of
Florida, setting off an inter-
national custody battle.
In 2001, as the war in
Afghanistan entered its
eighth week, CIA officer
Johnny “Mike” Spann
was killed during a prison
uprising in Mazar-e-Sharif,
becoming America’s first
combat casualty of the
conflict.
In 2002, President George
W. Bush signed legislation
creating the Department
of Homeland Security, and
appointed Tom Ridge to be
its head.
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QUOTE OF THE DAY
“There’s no one so intol-
erable or less tolerated in
society than someone who’s
intolerant.”
— Giacomo Leopardi,
Italian author and poet
S. John Collins/EO Media Group
A prescribed fire near Goose Creek, about 20 miles northeast of Baker City, produced a plume of smoke in early October. Autumn weather that
careened between extremes has had a profound effect on prescribed burning plans on public lands in Northeastern Oregon.
Weather fluctuations affect prescribed fires
By Jayson Jacoby
EO Media Group
BAKER CITY — Autumn weather
that careened between extremes has
had a profound effect on prescribed
burning plans on public lands in
Northeastern Oregon.
“It was a different sort of fall,”
said Steve Hawkins, fuels program
manager for the Wallowa-Whitman
National Forest.
The season swapped the typical se-
quence, starting with temperatures
more typical of winter, then transi-
tioning to a long spell of abnormally
warm and dry weather.
Crews ended up burning about
2,500 acres, mostly in three ar-
eas — Goose Creek about 20 miles
northeast of Baker City; near Unity
Reservoir; and in the Wolf Creek
area northwest of North Powder.
That’s more acreage than
Hawkins expected would be burned
back in early October, after a series
of Pacific storms doused the region
with rain and snow.
During that time, the grass and
pine needles that carry flames across
the ground were too wet to sustain
blazes.
The 2,500 acres burned is about
one-third of the area that’s typically
treated during the fall, Hawkins said.
Forest officials use prescribed
fire to accomplish a variety of tasks,
including reducing the amount of
combustible material on the ground,
and spurring the growth of forage for
wildlife and livestock.
Although the weather changed
dramatically after the middle of
October — 30 days in a row passed
without measurable rain at the
Baker City Airport, and the high
temperature was above average on
each of the first 20 days of Novem-
ber — two factors conspired to make
burning conditions marginal, he said.
First, as the period of daylight
Elf, grant help La
Grande Library
Observer Staff
La GRANDE — Santa
isn’t the only one with elves.
La Grande’s Cook Memorial
Library has its own helper.
Library director Kip Rob-
erson said in a news release
the new “Library Elf” helps
patrons manage library
loans and holds.
“If you have multiple
library cards to keep track of,
say, your own card plus the
kids’, you can quickly and
easily link and check mul-
tiple accounts at the same
time, without needing to log
in to each account separately
through the SAGE/library
catalog website,” according to
Roberson.
Library Elf is “like hav-
ing your own little digital
personal assistant,” he
continued, that provides
reminders about upcoming
overdue items, alerts about
actual overdue items and
hold requests.
But perhaps the system’s
best feature, he said, is the
automatic renewal.
“With Library Elf, you
can set up library materi-
als to automatically renew
once they’re due, offering
you a bit of a reprieve from
those overdue blues,” noted
Roberson. “This feature will
only kick in as long as no
one else has a request on the
same item you have checked
out, but still — you can’t beat
the convenience and peace of
mind it provides.”
To connect your library
account(s) to the service,
go to www.LibraryElf.com,
click on “List of Libraries,”
scroll down until you find
Oregon and Cook Memo-
rial Library, and click on
“sign-up.”
Roberson also reported
the Cook Memorial Library
received a $17,000 grant
from the Oregon Community
Foundation. The money will
go toward purchasing new
computers for the public to
use.
“We should be able to place
the order for the computers
and software in December
with a rollout to patrons in
very early 2020,” Roberson
said in the news release. “It
is going to be 16 computers,
which is our entire inventory
of computers used by the
public.”
The library’s computers
are showing their age, he
continued, and so many
were out of order the library
removed them.
The next generation of
the library’s computers
will feature Windows 10,
a much faster processor,
larger monitors, the Micro-
soft Office Suite of products
and improved security and
privacy features, according
to Roberson, who cred-
ited staff with winning the
grant.
“The staff spent consider-
able time this past summer
completing and submitting
the grant application to the
OCF, and their hard work
has definitely paid off,” he
stated.
For more information
about the Library Elf and
other library programs and
events, contact the library at
541-962-1339 or visit cook-
memoriallibrary.org.
shrinks with the approach of the win-
ter solstice, the burning “window” —
when conditions are conducive to a fire
that spreads at a reasonably rapid rate
— is confined to three or four hours
during the afternoon, Hawkins said.
Second, the long dry spell that
stretched from Oct. 20 through Nov.
18 was caused in large part by a
persistent high pressure ridge that
created a temperature inversion and
resulted in gentle winds.
In such conditions cooler air is
trapped in valleys, and smoke from
prescribed fires tends to settle rather
than disperse, Hawkins said.
Even though some areas slated for
prescribed burning dried sufficiently,
the stagnant conditions made it diffi-
cult to burn without violating smoke
guidelines, he said.
The potential for smoke was one
reason that prescribed burning
proposed for the Washington Gulch
area near Baker City was canceled
for this fall, Hawkins said.
The situation was somewhat dif-
ferent when it comes to burning piles
of slash.
During the early autumn, when
soggy ground rendered widespread
underburning impractical, conditions
were better suited to burning piles,
he said.
But the dry spell lasted so long
that eventually officials had to post-
pone some pile-burning due to the
potential for flames to spread from
the piles, Hawkins said.
“We didn’t want them creeping
onto private land,” he said.
With wintry weather forecasted to
return late this weekend and contin-
ue through Thanksgiving, Hawkins
said Thursday that it’s likely that
there won’t be any more widespread
prescribed burning this fall.
Pile-burning, which can be done
even with snow on the ground, will
continue.
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