SPONSORED BY
THE AIR WE BREATHE
A SPECIAL SECTION ON AIR QUALITY IN LANE COUNTY
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IL LU STR AT IO N BY CH EL S E A P LO UF F E
Smoke Gets in Your Lungs
Wildfires bring bad air quality to the Willamette Valley
he hellish wildfire smoke seen in the southern
Willamette Valley last August and September
2017 was, by all counts, the worst summer of
smoke this region has ever seen.
Peoples’ lungs were burning. A white-hot
bank of smoke choked our every horizon. The
smoke broke every record in history in this area.
A perfect storm of powerful wildfires surrounded
Eugene-Springfield to the south and east. The forests
burned and burned and burned — for weeks.
“What made last summer particularly bad is it was
many days of high smoke concentration. It was bad and it
was bad for a long periods of time. So we had people more
impacted,” says Merlyn Hough, director of Lane Regional
Air Protection Agency (LRAPA), which monitors air
quality for Lane County.
Twenty-eight out of 50 days last summer (July 30
to Sept. 17, 2017) were measured as moderate to very
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unhealthy levels of smoke in the air, according to LRAPA
records.
The sprawling forests of western Oregon are dry earlier
than normal this year, heightening the chances of an earlier
fire season, according to Jim Gersbach, public information
officer with Oregon Department of Forestry in Salem.
“If you were to walk in the forest and get a sense of
how dry the trees and dried grasses are now, it’s about what
they would be at the end of July and beginning of August,”
Gersbach says.
A 36,500-acre wildfire, the Klamathon Fire, has already
been tearing apart whole mountainsides on the California-
Oregon state line, prompting crews from northern
California and Oregon to respond.
“Many of our fire districts are reporting that conditions
on the ground are two to three weeks ahead of where you
would expect to see them this time of year. … We are
already in a position if an ember were to land, there’s a
BY JESLYN LEMKE
good chance it would start a fire,” Gersbach says.
Multiple fires are already burning across Oregon’s west
side: near Hood River in Memaloose State Park, Coos Bay
where the Lobster Creek fire is now mostly contained, and
another fire outside Medford that started July 5 and burned
about 100 acres before firefighters calmed it.
The huge acreage of scorched earth left behind by fires
in the Willamette Forest last year may or may not give rise
to worse fires this year, Gersbach says.
“It depends entirely on how much of the fuel the fire
consumed when it was burning. In some cases, if you have
a complete moonscape and the fire reached a high intensity
and it burned down all the young trees and brush and it
burns the stumps down to charcoal, you might not have
much of a fire risk there the next season.”
In other areas, if a fire rushes through quickly at a lower
heat, it could leave behind miles of trees that die months
later. Those dead, dried trees make easy fuel for next year’s
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