A2 The BulleTin • Sunday, auguST 1, 2021
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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.”
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