LOCAL
Wallowa.com
Wednesday, October 21, 2020
A9
Fire season comes to an end Wallowa-Whitman fi refi ghters
Season ends with
still fi ghting blazes elsewhere
Wallowa County
By KATY NESBITT
For the Wallowa
County Chieftain
seeing just over
10 acres burned
By RONALD BOND
Wallowa County Chieftain
ENTERPRISE — Fire
season in many parts of Ore-
gon has been brutal.
But in the northeast cor-
ner, it has been considerably
tame, and was declared offi -
cially over Saturday, Oct. 17.
The Oregon Department
of Forestry, in a press release
Thursday, Oct. 15, said it
was terminating fi re season
for forest lands that are “pro-
tected by the Northeast Ore-
gon District” at 12:01 a.m.
Saturday.
The
district
includes land in Wallowa,
Union, Baker and Umatilla
counties, as well as portions
of Grant, Morrow and Mal-
heur counties.
“The past few days have
brought quite a bit of pre-
cipitation across the region,”
Matt Howard, Wallowa Unit
Forester,” said in the release.
“While the district is comfort-
able with removing the gen-
eral fi re season restrictions,
it is important to remember
that weather patterns could
change and conditions could
return to dry and windy. This
probably isn’t the right time
to burn slash or large debris
piles. Waiting for more mois-
ture and a sustained fall
weather pattern is key.”
While fi res raged on the
west side of the state, espe-
cially during September, Ore-
gon’s northeast corner was
relatively unscathed. In all,
the district responded to 66
Ellen Morris Bishop/For the Wallowa County Chieftain, File
Smoke from the epic forest fi res in Western Oregon and
Northern California obscure the landscape on Alder Slope as
an orange sun sets over Ruby Peak on Sunday, Sept. 13, 2020.
Fire season in the Northeast Oregon District offi cially ended
Saturday, Oct. 17, 2020, with the district having just more
than 250 acres burned.
fi res — 40 lightning-started
and 26 human-caused — that
burned a combined 253.5
acres.
By comparison, the entire
district has about 1,400 acres
a year burn on average, How-
ard told the Chieftain Oct. 15.
Things were even better
in Wallowa County, where
Howard said just over 10
acres burned.
“My hat’s off to the folks
in our community for being
fi re conscious,” Howard said.
In fact, Howard said the
month of July was histori-
cally good in the county.
“We didn’t have one fi re
on our jurisdiction in July,
which has never happened
before,” he said.
The records tracking that
data, he said, go back to 1960,
“and I would be shocked if it
didn’t go back to the begin-
ning of the Department of
Forestry,” he said.
And given what happened
in Western Oregon, Howard
feels fortunate to have gone
through a light season.
“We defi nitely had the
potential in late August and
September,” he said. “Our
fuels were critical. (As a
result), we were able to sup-
port fi re efforts across the
state. We sent a lot of people
out to help with large fi re sup-
port this year.”
Landowners do have the
OK to begin using burn bar-
rels or to burn yard debris
piles, the release states.
And through the restric-
tions will be lifted, How-
ard encouraged the public to
remain cautious.
“What we want to stress
is for folks to be really care-
ful in the fall with their burn-
ing, that they stay with (their
fi res), that they make sure
it’s out,” he said, adding
that those burning industrial
slash piles need to notify the
department and register the
burn with ODF, then report
back when the burn is done.
ENTERPRISE — Wild-
fi res raging in California and
the Southwest are extending
fi re season for many Wal-
lowa County fi refi ghters.
Last week a 20-person
hand crew headed to the
Arapaho-Roosevelt National
Forest in Colorado to fi ght
the Cameron Peak Fire, and
an engine with six crew
members was dispatched to
the Tonto National Forest in
Arizona.
“Arizona’s fi re season
won’t stop,” said Nathan
Goodrich, Wallowa-Whit-
man National Forest north
zone fi re management offi -
cer. “The season usually
ends in late July, but it didn’t
get the monsoons it usually
does.”
Goodrich called the Tonto
a “sister” forest to the Wal-
lowa-Whitman, and said it’s
normal for crews from each
of the forests to support each
other as the two regions’
fi re seasons don’t generally
overlap.
“We have had a relation-
ship with the Tonto for six
to eight years,” Goodrich
said, “We send people down
there and they send people
up here.”
This year, Oregon’s fi re
season was slow to materi-
alize, but blew up the week
of Labor Day to an historic
level, taxing resources as col-
lege students started return-
ing to class. Now that fi res
in Western Oregon are cool-
ing down, Goodrich said
Area national forests receive $2.7 million
Funding will help
Forest Service pay
for vegetation
management
and monitoring
By ANN BLOOM
For the Wallowa
County Chieftain
ENTERPRISE — The
Wallowa-Whitman
and
Umatilla
national
for-
ests will receive $2.7 mil-
lion to improve forest resil-
iency, reduce long-term
costs of fi re management
and improve watershed
conditions across North-
east Oregon and southeast
Washington.
“We are deeply excited
that the Northern Blue
Mountains
Collabora-
tive will be receiving fund-
ing from the Collaborative
Landscape Forest Resto-
ration Project this year after
being ranked the top pro-
posal from across the coun-
try,” said Alyssa Cudmore,
Forestland Program man-
ager and coordinator for
Wallowa Resource’s My
Blue Mountains Woodland
Partnership.
Cudmore said the total
investment could exceed
$40 million over the next 10
years if Congress continues
to fund this program.
Congress created the For-
est Restoration Project fund-
ing in 2009, and intended
to support large scale forest
restoration projects and ben-
efi t local communities using
collaborative approaches to
solve forest health problems.
“In particular, we are
very excited about the CFL-
RP’s ability to implement all
lands’ shared stewardship of
forest restoration and fi res
resilience projects across the
Northern Blues landscape,”
Cudmore said.
Many of the challenges
forests and communities
face today, such as severe
wildfi re, invasive species,
insects and disease, she said,
don’t adhere to boundaries
and don’t stop at fi re lines.
“In order to prepare our
forests to withstand these
natural disturbances we need
solutions that cross boundar-
ies regardless of who owns
the land,” she said.
The $2.7 million will
only be used for projects on
federal land managed by the
Forest Service. However,
this investment will help
leverage other funding for
projects on tribal and private
land adjacent to Forest Ser-
vice-managed public land.
According to Cudmore,
these treatments will reduce
overstocked forests with
timber harvest, thinning
and prescribed fi re creat-
ing landscapes and commu-
nities that can better endure
wildfi re. All of this will ulti-
mately support vibrant, local
economies, healthy water-
sheds and healthy forests
with reduced wildlife risk,
she said.
Cudmore said the con-
cept of shared steward-
ship of the land was evident
throughout the grant pro-
posal and emphasized that
there were many partners
involved in its creation and
the prioritization of projects.
The project is supported by
the Forest Service, the coun-
ties within the Umatilla and
Wallowa-Whitman national
forests, industry and conser-
vation groups like Wallowa
Resources, one of the lead
organizations that worked
on the grant application.
Executive Director Nils
Christoffersen said the
Northern Blues Collabora-
tive, with its founding mem-
bers serving since 2012, rec-
ognized an urgent need and
has long aspired to scale up
the collaborative’s early suc-
cess to address restoration
and rural economic revi-
talization in projects such
as the Lower Joseph Creek
project in Wallowa County
and the East Face project
bordering Union and Baker
counties.
Included in the funding
is money to pay for moni-
toring Forest Service tim-
ber harvest, thinning and
prescribed burning projects.
Baker and Wallowa counties
are looking to employ youth
and young adults to learn
and execute forest monitor-
ing techniques.
“We’re excited that part-
nerships continue to expand
and deepen as we pursue all
lands shared stewardship
across Northeast Oregon
and Southeast Washington,”
Christoffersen said. “We
look forward to the oppor-
tunity this will create for
the next generation of land
stewards to gain jobs and
experience in caring for this
special place.”
Lindsay
Warness,
Woodgrain Millwork in La
Grande’s Forest Policy and
Environmental
manager,
said she is looking forward
to working with the Forest
Service and using this fund-
ing to develop projects that
are benefi cial and meet the
social, economic and eco-
logical needs of both for-
est and communities that
depend on them.
“This is an exciting
opportunity to increase the
pace and scale of resto-
ration in our area as well as
provide economic benefi ts
to our local communities,”
Warness said.
According to Mike Bill-
man, Oregon Department
of Forestry’s Northeast Ore-
gon Federal Forest Res-
toration Program Coordi-
nator, the funding will be
instrumental in accomplish-
ing fuel-reduction and forest
restoration projects vetted
through the environmental
planning process, but still in
need of funding.
“The Wallowa-Whitman
and Umatilla national for-
ests have huge backlogs of
acres needing treatments and
increased funding will cer-
tainly help in attaining some
level of catching up,” Bill-
man said. “It has been truly
inspiring to watch the stake-
holder partnerships form
and step up in the process of
preparing the CFLRP pro-
posal and now draw together
to begin implementation.”
Wallowa County
FREE
Chess Club
remaining seasonal and per-
manent employees are being
released for availability in
other regions.
The 20-person hand
crew that went to Colorado
was the fi fth of its type dis-
patched off-forest this sea-
son, Goodrich said. Last
weekend, his overhead team
was headed to support fi res
in Northern California near
Redding where one fi re, the
August Complex, has burned
1 million acres. He said the
California fi re season started
a little early this year and will
likely continue for more than
another month.
“IT’S BEEN A BUSY
YEAR ROTATING
TEAMS.”
— Nathan Goodrich,
Wallowa-Whitman National
Forest north zone fi re
management offi cer
“It’s been a busy year
rotating teams,” Goodrich
said. “Team members are
getting tired, and it’s getting
hard to fi ll out manifests.”
Luckily, some of the sea-
sonal employees still avail-
able and willing to work are
able to, due to an extension
of allowable days to work.
Goodrich said by allow-
ing seasonals to work past
Sept. 30, the end of the fed-
eral fi scal year, between 500
and 1,000 fi re fi ghters were
added to the ranks to staff
late season wildfi res.
Many of the Wal-
lowa-Whitman
National
Forest fi refi ghters were
held back to burn piles and
to broadcast burn this fall.
Goodrich said in Wallowa
County his crews would
mostly be burning slash piles
from thinning projects as the
recent rains dampened hopes
of doing large prescribed
burns.
“There may be a window
later on, but in the meantime
we will help out the south
end of the forest where ele-
vations are lower and dryer,”
he said.
COVID-19 restrictions
played heavily in the lives
of fi refi ghters and their man-
agers this year, Goodrich
said, and the end result was
healthier crew members.
Typically by September and
October crews come down
with what he called “camp
crud.” He credited wearing
face coverings, hand wash-
ing, crews eating at their
vehicles and using toilets
reserved for their modules,
small groups of co-workers,
for slowing down the spread
of late fi re season colds and
fl us.
“Nobody’s
sick,”
Goodrich said.
Other precautions taken
on the fi reline Goodrich
listed were hosting morning
briefi ngs via video confer-
encing and all planning and
public meetings were virtual.
He said while some fi refi ght-
ers did contract COVID-19
on the fi reline, for the most
part sickness was curtailed.
“The precautions worked,
for the most part, really
well,” he said
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