A handful of small fires in recent weeks show that wildfire season has arrived in the Pacific Northwest. And that has fire crews around the state preparing for what could be a busy season.
As fire concerns grow, local fire departments in Oregon that spend most of their time fighting fires that occur in buildings are making sure their firefighters are equipped with the skills that are needed to fight fires on open land and in forests.
One such example was the Metro Advanced Wildland School live fire exercise that took place earlier this month.
More than 100 firefighters from local departments around the state gathered at Bar 88 southeast of Molalla, to freshen up on their wildfire fighting techniques.
“We're testing them and making sure that they know how to do all of their skills in essentially a controlled, but live fire environment,” Simone Cordery-Cotter is with the Oregon Department of the State Fire Marshal.
Those skills include a variety of techniques not normally associated with fighting structure fires.
“There's a lot of different science that goes into it. I mean, you won't see us putting fire down on structural fires, that's one thing. The structures, they'll move wind differently, and tunnel the wind through a structure. You want to quickly get on those fires and be able to get a ton of water on them quickly. You don't have that ability out in the wildlands,” said Eugene-Springfield Firefighter Brett Deedon.
Crews began the day with a briefing about working around helicopters that carry buckets capable of holding around 500 gallons of water. Today, that water will not be used to extinguish the fire. They will work in tandem with fire engines and crew members to create a border around the large fuels that will be burnt.
The crew members use drip torches and axe-like tools called a Pulaskis to clear dead grass.
“What we've done is we've essentially created a wet and a black line that will keep that fire contained,” said Cordery-Cotter.
Alan Fitzpatrick, a Wildland Strategic Planning Manager at Portland Fire and Rescue, gives a refresher course on what goes into creating the black line, and how to do it safely.
He talked about what firefighters are hearing and seeing. Lessons like lighting a small test fire to understand conditions, how crackling sounds mean fuels are not fully dried out, and to never walk backwards with a drip torch.
Once the firefighters had finished the black line around the larger fuels pile, they moved in and began lighting the dead and down vegetation that had been gathered, sparking off flames that reached up well above their heads.
“Working in the wildland urban interface is something that is very much needed, and we don't have a lot of reps at that, right? It's one of those low frequency but high intensity situations. We've seen that a lot right in the last 10 years, we've seen an increase in that wild and urban interface fire,” said Fitzpatrick.
That sentiment was echoed by Deedon.
“The new term out there is the urban conflagration. So our ability to be able to protect the periphery of the cities and be able to quickly engage in those conditions allows us to have better protection when and if those fires directly go against the urban areas,” he said.
Clearing down vegetation like this is important in those efforts. Fitzpatrick referred to what the crews were seeing as “good smoke.”
“We're doing this in a very controlled way. I got 100 of my closest friends out here with me today who are professionals, right? And so we're able to put fire on the ground in a safe way to consume fuel. We're putting smoke on the ground when we want to, in the conditions that we want to, where it's controllable, so that it's not that high intensity extreme fire that we can't manage,” he said.
And controlling the plants that become fire fuel as the summer heats up and conditions dry out is an important step, he said. Whether it’s crews doing work like this, or a homeowner mowing tall grass and clearing out vegetation close to their house.
