NORTHWEST
East Oregonian
A2
Tuesday, July 27, 2021
Northeast Oregon native leading effort to stop nation’s largest wildfire
By JAYSON JACOBY
Baker City Herald
BAKER CITY — Joe
Hessel remembers when the
Dooley Mountain Fire, which
burned 20,000 acres south of
Baker City over several days,
was a “giant” blaze.
Nowadays he’s coordinat-
ing the effort to stem a fire
that burned more land than
that every day.
For almost two weeks
straight.
This yawning difference
between what was typical
early in Hessel’s career, and
what is commonplace today,
illustrates his longevity in a
way perhaps more compel-
ling than a couple of numbers
can.
Certainly Hessel, who
lives in Baker City and is in
his 38th summer amidst the
smoke and the flames, can
attest to the changes time
has wrought when it comes
to fighting wildland fires in
Oregon and across the West.
The Dooley Mountain
Fire, sparked by lightning in
late July 1989, was at the time
the biggest blaze in Baker
County in several decades.
It also was an abnormally
large fire by Oregon stan-
dards.
But today, the acreage
charred that distant summer
would occupy a scarcely
noticeable corner of the fire
that has kept Hessel away
Bootleg Fire Incident Command/Contributed Photo
Columns of smoke rise from the wildfire burning in Klamath and Lake counties Sunday, July
18, 2021. The fire as of July 26 became the largest in the U.S, approaching 410,000 acres.
from his Baker City home,
and his La Grande office, for
almost two weeks.
Hessel, 54, who is the
Northeast District forester
for the Oregon Department
of Forestry, is one of three
incident commanders for
the Bootleg Fire, a lightning
fire burning in Klamath and
Lake counties in south-cen-
tral Oregon.
Approaching 410,00 acres
as of Monday, July 26, it’s the
nation’s biggest blaze, the one
responsible for much of the
smoke that has clogged Baker
Valley at times this month.
The one that has spawned
smoke plumes which look,
from the vantage point of
space satellites, similar to a
cataclysmic volcanic erup-
tion.
Hessel said his experi-
ence on the Bootleg Fire
has led him to ponder, as he
sometimes has over the past
32 years, the days when he
worked on the Dooley Moun-
tain Fire as a firefighter with
the ODF.
“That was one of the first
big fires I was involved in,
Forecast for Pendleton Area
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TODAY
WEDNESDAY
THURSDAY
FRIDAY
SATURDAY
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Mostly sunny and
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Mostly sunny and
very hot
Hot with sun and
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and it left an impact on my
mind,” Hessel said in a phone
interview from the Bootleg
Fire camp.
The Dooley Mountain Fire
affected Hessel in a couple of
ways.
He remembers vividly
the photograph that S. John
Collins, retired Baker City
Herald photojournalist, took
from Main Street in down-
town Baker City on July 30,
1989. The photo shows the
fire’s smoke cloud loom-
ing above the city’s historic
buildings, the angle of the
95° 68°
101° 71°
BY AIMEE GREEN
The Oregonian
103° 72°
103° 74°
HERMISTON TEMPERATURE FORECAST
93° 69°
99° 68°
105° 70°
107° 76°
107° 73°
OREGON FORECAST
ALMANAC
Shown is today’s weather. Temperatures are today’s highs and tonight’s lows.
PENDLETON
through 3 p.m. yest.
HIGH
LOW
TEMP.
Seattle
Olympia
73/53
86/60
95/63
Longview
Kennewick Walla Walla
91/71
Lewiston
83/55
94/68
Astoria
69/53
Pullman
Yakima 93/62
84/53
95/72
Portland
Hermiston
88/62
The Dalles 93/69
Salem
Corvallis
86/58
Yesterday
Normals
Records
La Grande
88/65
PRECIPITATION
John Day
Eugene
Bend
91/59
81/59
91/60
Ontario
103/75
Caldwell
Burns
91°
64°
95°
60°
109° (1939) 45° (1936)
24 hours ending 3 p.m.
Month to date
Normal month to date
Year to date
Last year to date
Normal year to date
Albany
87/60
Boardman
Pendleton
Medford
86/69
0.00"
Trace
0.10"
1.93"
1.66"
5.12"
WINDS (in mph)
97/70
89/54
0.00"
Trace
0.31"
4.34"
8.63"
8.26"
through 3 p.m. yest.
HIGH
LOW
TEMP.
Pendleton 87/57
91/60
24 hours ending 3 p.m.
Month to date
Normal month to date
Year to date
Last year to date
Normal year to date
HERMISTON
Enterprise
89/66
92/66
87°
61°
92°
60°
109° (1928) 40° (1908)
PRECIPITATION
Moses
Lake
82/55
Aberdeen
90/65
94/67
Tacoma
Yesterday
Normals
Records
Spokane
Wenatchee
81/59
Today
Wed.
SW 7-14
W 6-12
SW 4-8
WNW 6-12
SUN AND MOON
Klamath Falls
71/51
Forecasts and graphics provided by AccuWeather, Inc. ©2021
Sunrise today
Sunset tonight
Moonrise today
Moonset today
5:33 a.m.
8:30 p.m.
10:53 p.m.
9:31 a.m.
Last
New
First
Full
July 31
Aug 8
Aug 15
Aug 22
NATIONAL EXTREMES
Yesterday’s National Extremes: (for the 48 contiguous states)
High 104° in Durant, Okla. Low 37° in West Yellowstone, Mont.
increasingly difficult for
agencies to find employees
willing to potentially give
up much of their summer, to
forego family vacations in
favor of traveling hundreds of
miles to work on a big blaze.
“We used to go out maybe
only once in a summer,”
Hessel said. “One of our
teams was out five times last
year.”
The Bootleg Fire is his
team’s second assignment
this summer. The first, also
in Klamath County, was the
Cutoff Fire in June.
Hessel, whose dad was a
Forest Service smokejumper
and manager of the firefight-
ing air center in La Grande
while he was growing up, said
incident management teams
typically are assigned to a fire
for 14 days, with the potential
to extend the stay to 21 days.
Team members then return
home for a couple days.
Hessel, who was sent to
the Bootleg Fire on July 10,
said he doubts he’ll return
home before July 27.
And after his time off, he
said his team will be “back
on the board” — mean-
ing they’re available to be
assigned to another fire.
And with most of Oregon
enduring extreme fire danger,
Hessel doesn’t expect to wait
long for his next job.
“It’s become a recur-
ring theme every summer,”
Hessel said.
Trump-Biden voting
split aligns with rates
PENDLETON TEMPERATURE FORECAST
89° 66°
lens making the blaze seem
much closer than it was (the
fire never got within about
eight miles of town).
Hessel calls the photo an
“iconic image.”
But that acreage figure —
20,000 — was memorable,
too.
In 1989, its size made the
Dooley Mountain Fire an
outlier.
It was a time when fire-
fighters considered even a
500-acre fire a significant
blaze.
But then Hessel, who
started his firefighting career
with ODF at age 16, compares
Dooley Mountain to Bootleg.
“This fire grew an average
of 30,000 acres for 13 days
straight,” he said.
The Bootleg Fire is the
sort of blaze that requires a
group of specialists — what’s
known as an “overhead
team” or “incident manage-
ment team” — to coordinate
the efforts of hundreds or
even thousands of people, as
well as bulldozers and other
equipment on the ground,
and air tankers and helicop-
ters above.
Almost 2,400 people were
assigned to the Bootleg Fire.
Hessel, who heads one
of the ODF’s three overhead
teams, said they have been
called out more often, and for
longer periods, over the past
several years.
He said it has become
SALEM — What’s true across the nation
appears to be true in Oregon: If you’re a
Republican, you’re less likely to be vacci-
nated against COVID-19.
The Oregonian looked at the county-
by-county statistics of Oregonians inoc-
ulated against the coronavirus and saw a
clear correlation: The 10 counties with the
lowest percentages of residents vaccinated
all voted — by a landslide — for Donald
Trump in the last presidential election.
That’s Lake, Malheur, Umatilla, Grant,
Harney, Gilliam, Morrow, Union, Douglas
and Baker counties.
Eight of the 10 counties with the high-
est vaccination rates voted overwhelm-
ingly for Joseph Biden. That’s Washington,
Hood River, Multnomah, Benton, Lincoln,
Deschutes, Lane and Clackamas.
Polk and Tillamook — where Trump
beat Biden by slim margins of less than 2
percentage points — also made Oregon’s top
10 list of most-immunized counties.
Another way to look at it? Compare
the most-Republican county in the state
— Lake — with the most-Democratic —
Multnomah. Eight out of 10 voters in Lake
County voted for Trump in November 2020,
and 35% of residents 16 and older in the
county received at least one shot of COVID-
19 vaccine as of early July.
Conversely, nearly 8 out of 10 voters
in Multnomah County chose Biden, and
73% of residents 16 and older — more than
double the figure in Lake County — had
received at least one jab.
Asked about Lake County’s low inocula-
tion rate, James Williams, chairman of the
County Commission, bristled at the correla-
tion between voting and vaccinations.
“If you are looking to attack or degrade
the majority (or any part) of Lake County’s
population, based around their political affili-
ation and/or their medical choices,” Williams
wrote in an email, “I would say that it not only
shows a shameful personal bias on your part,
but possibly the need to find a new profession.”
Meanwhile, George Murdock, chair of the
Umatilla County Board of Commissioners,
said he’s a Republican and got vaccinated on
the first day he was eligible. “Mind boggling”
is how he described the Republican-Demo-
crat divide.
“It just doesn’t make any sense to me,”
Murdock said. “There’s absolutely no reason
for it to be polarized between political parties.”
Umatilla County, where 64% voted for
Trump, has the third lowest vaccination rate in
the state, with just more than 41% of residents
16 and older having received at least one shot.
Murdock, 78, is vocal about his vaccination
status and the story of his daughter, 46, who
still is a COVID-19 longhauler seven months
after she came down with the virus.
In Oregon, it’s also worth noting the coun-
ties with the highest rates of vaccine hesitancy
or resistance are generally the smallest and
most rural in the state. Some observers say
that might contribute to lower vaccination
rates: Residents don’t perceive COVID-19 as
a significant threat.
NATIONAL WEATHER TODAY
IN BRIEF
Starkey Experimental
Forest and Range closed to
overnight use
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LA GRANDE — The U.S. Forest Service
announced it closed the Starkey Experimen-
tal Forest and Range to overnight camping or
other overnight uses in response to extreme
fire danger.
Starkey remains open to public entry, but
public uses must adhere to fire-prevention
measures for the Wallowa-Whitman National
Forest under Phase C Public Use Restrictions.
“The extreme fire danger this early in the fire
season necessitated our decision to close Star-
key to overnight camping,” said Mike Wisdom,
a research wildlife biologist with the Forest
Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station.
“We will be monitoring fire risk and how best
to adapt to the situation going forward.”
The 25,000-acre experimental forest and
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range is 28 miles southwest of La Grande on
the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. The
Pacific Northwest Research Station and the
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manage the area, formally designated for
research in 1940, for collaborative studies of
deer, elk and cattle and their interactions with
public land uses. The Forest Service partners
with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wild-
life to conduct wildlife management at Starkey,
which includes hunting.
Planned public hunts, under ODFW, begin
Sunday, Aug. 1, at Starkey and will occur as
proposed for hunters who have successfully
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Hunters can camp at sites on the
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