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About The Bulletin. (Bend, OR) 1963-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 1, 2021)
A2 The BulleTin • Sunday, auguST 1, 2021 The Bulletin LOCAL, STATE & REGION How to reach us CIRCULATION Didn’t receive your paper? Start or stop subscription? 541-385-5800 PHONE HOURS 8 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday-Friday 7 a.m.-11 a.m. Saturday-Sunday and holidays GENERAL INFORMATION 541-382-1811 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Mon.-Fri. ONLINE www.bendbulletin.com EMAIL bulletin@bendbulletin.com AFTER HOURS Newsroom ................................541-383-0348 Circulation ................................541-385-5800 NEWSROOM EMAIL Business ........business@bendbulletin.com City Desk .............news@bendbulletin.com Features.................................................................. communitylife@bendbulletin.com Sports ................. sports@bendbulletin.com NEWSROOM FAX 541-385-5804 OUR ADDRESS Street .............. 320 SW Upper Terrace Drive Suite 200 Bend, OR 97702 Mailing ........... P.O. Box 6020 Bend, OR 97708 ADMINISTRATION Publisher Heidi Wright ..............................541-383-0341 Editor Gerry O’Brien .............................541-633-2166 DEPARTMENT HEADS Advertising Brian Naplachowski .................541-383-0370 Circulation/Operations Jeremy Feldman ......................541-617-7830 Finance Anthony Georger ....................541-383-0324 Human Resources ................541-383-0340 TALK TO AN EDITOR City Julie Johnson ...................541-383-0367 Business, Features, GO! 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If you know of an error in a story, call us at 541-383-0367. TO SUBSCRIBE Call us ......................541-385-5800 • Home delivery and E-Edition ..........................$7 per week • By mail .................................$9.50 per week • E-Edition only ...................$4.50 per week To sign up for our e-Editions, visit www.bendbulletin.com to register. TO PLACE AN AD Classified ......................................541-385-5809 Advertising fax ..........................541-385-5802 Other information ....................541-382-1811 OBITUARIES Call to ask about deadlines, Monday- Friday, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. ............541-385-5809 OTHER SERVICES Back issues ................................541-385-5800 Photo reprints .........................541-383-0366 Apply for a job ........................541-383-0340 All Bulletin payments are accepted at the drop box at City Hall or at The Bulletin, P.O. Box 6020, Bend, OR 97708. Check payments may be converted to an electronic funds transfer. The Bulletin, USPS #552-520, is published daily by Central Oregon Media Group, 320 SW Upper Terrace Drive, Bend, OR 97702. Periodicals postage paid at Bend, OR. Postmaster: Send address changes to The Bulletin circulation department, P.O. Box 6020, Bend, OR 97708. The Bulletin retains ownership and copyright protection of all staff-prepared news copy, advertising copy and news or ad illustrations. They may not be reproduced without explicit prior approval. BOOTLEG FIRE How the massive Oregon blaze went from ‘campfire to bonfire’ BY TED SICKINGER The Oregonian After surpassing 400,000 acres Thursday, the Bootleg Fire in south-central Oregon remained not only the largest active fire in the nation, but it also became the state’s third- largest megafire officially re- corded since 1900, according to an inventory kept by the Or- egon Department of Forestry. The growth of the fire was spectacular. It began July 6 and quickly quadrupled in size, then doubled on back-to-back days, chewing through 143,000 acres by July 11. It increased nearly three- fold after that, etching its name higher in the record books. “A slow day for this fire was 10,000 acres,” said Marcus Kauffman, a spokesman for the Oregon Department of Forestry. But as big as this raging fire is — and it is a leviathan — fire research suggests there were much larger wildfires before the historical record was established in Oregon,such as the Silverton Fire in 1865 that reportedly hit up to 1 million acres. The Oregon Department of Forestry, for its part, acknowl- edges it does not keep records before 1900. Indeed, some of that his- toric fire research indicates that megafires were frequent occurrences in the ponderosa pine and mixed conifer stands where the Bootleg Fire started in the Fremont-Winema Na- tional Forest. The difference this time, and a cause for significant concern as climate change increases the frequency of drought and ex- treme weather events like last month’s heat wave, is the sever- ity of the fire and the ecological disaster it portends. Keala Hagmann, an ecolo- gist associated with the Uni- versity of Washington, and Andrew Merschel, a doctoral candidate at Oregon State Uni- versity’s College of Forestry, were able to reconstruct a pre- cise historical record of fires in a 150,000-acre study area of the Fremont-Winema region back to 1650, and in some areas date fires back to the 1300s. How did they do that? Just over a decade ago, Hag- mann found 100-year-old tim- ber inventory records covering almost a million acres of the landscape at the National Ar- chives and Records Adminis- tration in Seattle. Recognizing that they had rare post-fire tree survival data from earlier fires, the duo set out to determine how fire behaved before the U.S. Forest Service, the state of Oregon and local residents adopted the aggressive fire sup- pression tactics that have char- acterized the last century. By taking cross sections of stumps and logs over a 150,000-acre portion of the Fremont-Winema, they were able to identify fire scars and drought signatures and date them precisely. Replicating the same process over the broad landscape, they were also able to estimate the size of those in- dividual fires within the study area, though many of the con- flagrations extended beyond the study boundaries. The upshot: Prior to the last 100 years, fires of comparable size to the Bootleg have oc- Bootleg Fire Incident Command via AP Trees burn at the Bootleg Fire in south-central Oregon. The fire is the state’s third-largest megafire officially recorded since 1900, according to an inventory kept by the Oregon Department of Forestry. LOCAL BRIEFING Wildfires north of Madras 20% contained Two wildfires burning north of Madras were 20% con- tained as of Saturday. The Deep Creek Fire, 21 miles north of Madras and north of the junction of U.S. Highway 97 and U.S. Highway 197, started Thursday and was 1,219 acres as of Saturday, accord- ing to Central Oregon Fire Info, a multiagency fire informa- tion resource. The Johnson Ridge Fire, 9 miles northwest of Shaniko, started early Friday morning and was 772 acres. With minimal precipitation in the area Friday night, the Deep Creek fire continued to spread to the north and east. Firefighters were targeting the northern portion of the fire Saturday to reduce spread. Both fires have hand crews, engines and dozers operat- ing. Possible heavy precipitation and thunderstorms are predicted again over the area. There are 135 personnel staffing the fires. A fire camp for the two fires is at Madras Elementary school. — Bulletin staff report curred every 15 to 25 years in that ecosystem, typically coin- ciding with periods of drought, Merschel said. One of the more recent his- toric examples of a large blaze in that area came in 1918, a year of severe drought in Or- egon, when fire burned some 200,000 acres of the forest, ac- cording to the researchers. That fire is not on the state’s list but appears in an annual report from the Department of the Interior for what was then the Klamath Indian Reserva- tion. Jim Gersbach, a spokesman for the forestry department, expressed surprise that a large fire post-1900 would be miss- ing from the state’s list but noted the difficulty in tracking the size of some historic fires with full accuracy. That fire was almost 20 years before the Forest Service ad- opted its 10 a.m. rule, which decreed that every fire should be suppressed by 10 a.m. the day following its initial report. Forest ecologists now believe that policy, coupled with log- ging and grazing practices over the subsequent century, inter- rupted the natural and healthy cycle of fire in forests through- out the west, leaving a tinder- box of fuels kindling the severe fires being seen today. There were big fires on the Fremont-Winema, accord- ing to the researchers, in 1741, 1773, 1783, 1795, 1822, 1829 … and on. Based on the evidence of those fires, combined with the inventory of standing timber in the early 20th century, they determined that those fires were generally low intensity, and left behind an open forest structure with large, older and fire-resistant trees spread ubiq- uitously across the landscape. Flash forward to the present. Early severity maps from the Bootleg Fire suggest it burned with high intensity, torching vast swaths of trees as it moved across the landscape. Recovery of those ponderosa pine forests could take centuries, Merschel said, if it’s even possible under today’s conditions. “Seeing this fire today, we have an ironclad case that the severity of fires is much different than what it was 100 years ago,” said Merschel, who is pursuing his doctorate in forest ecology. “It’s been really alarming that all of this burned up in the course of two weeks,” he added. “What is shows is that we’re really running out of time to restore these dry forests. We’re running out of time to get this right.” Fire projects “Restoring” the forests, how- ever, remains a controversial topic. Lawmakers in Oregon just passed a bill that makes a tiny down payment on the vast backlog of thinning and prescribed fire projects they suggest are necessary to reduce risks in the most fire-prone forests in the state. The need is vast, they suggest, at as much as 5.6 million acres and a cost of $4 billion over 20 years. The federal government, mean- while, which owns some 60% of Oregon’s forests, has done little to address the problem. Conservation advocates, meanwhile, maintain that such projects are generally ineffec- tive, as the incidence of wild- fires encountering areas that have been treated is low; those areas still burn with high in- tensity when fire intrudes, and the carbon loss associated with commercial thinning and post- fire salvage logging is counter- productive. Either way, severe fires are hardly unprecedented, though the underpinnings vary ac- cording to available fuels, to- pography and weather. Take, for example, the first of the succession of fires known as the Tillamook Burn, in 1933. Driven by heavy east winds, that fire reportedly burned through more than 200,000 acres in one 20-hour period. Similarly extraordi- nary wind conditions during last year’s Labor Day fires consumed almost a million acres in a few days in areas on the west side of the Cascades, where fire is infrequent,leading to the most devastating season on record. Those were wind-driven fires, experts say. The Bootleg, while it saw some big winds, was primarily fuel driven. “There’s only one way to get a 40,000-foot pyrocumu- lus cloud,” said John Bailey, a professor in OSU’s College of Forestry, referring to the mas- sive columns of smoke that rose over the Bootleg Fire, then collapsed, stoking the fire with massive downdrafts. “It requires fuel, and fuel that is ready to burn,” he said. “It’s like going from a campfire to a bonfire.” The biggest signal the Boot- leg Fire is sending, Bailey agrees, is how land management pat- terns and historical fire suppres- sion efforts have changed forest conditions and fire dynamics, and how much risk that poses during an era of climate change. “I was a fire suppressor back in the ’80s,” he said. “We thought it was the right thing to be doing to save the forest, and we were wrong. And we’re paying the price now.” Ways you can support Thelma’s Place: • Vehicle donations • Cash donations • Sponsorships • Volunteer CHILD CARE AN INTERGENERATIONAL PROGRAM Your support makes a difference! Redmond: 541-548-3049 Day Respite and Support Groups www.thelmasplace.org “Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.” - Rene Magritte JOHN RUNNELS 103 NW Oregon Ave. • Downtown Bend 541-306-3176 • redchairgallerybend.com Juzo Compress ion Stocking Sale Now - Aug 31 st Post-Mastectomy Care Compression, Bras, Hats, Wigs, Breast Pumps Call for appointment 541.383.8085 345 NE Norton Ave., Bend, OR 97701 | mariposaoregon.com
