Five years ago, Oregon saw the deadliest wildfire season in state history. Eleven lives were lost, skies turned orange, more than 4,000 homes burned and tens of thousands of Oregonians evacuated as multiple fires scorched more than a million acres.
Global temperatures had been rising for decades leading up to the Labor Day fires. The western side of the Cascade Mountains, once virtually untouched by major fires, had seen more serious blazes and worsening drought since at least 2015. Across the state, fires were igniting more often and burning more terrain. As hot winds raced across a parched Oregon landscape over the 2020 Labor Day weekend, those changing conditions converged to set the state on fire.
That year also transformed how Oregon thinks about and responds to fire. Some who lost their homes are still fighting for stability. Others have won multimillion-dollar court judgments and settlements. But Oregon still lacks a long-term plan to pay for the next big conflagration.
As Labor Day 2025 approaches, OPB is looking back at the long, fiery weekend that changed thousands of lives, and forced Oregon to take a closer look at fire in a changing world.
What happened
COVID-19 had already marked 2020 as an exceptional year by the spring. A global pandemic left people isolated and cut off. Death tolls climbed in Oregon and lockdowns kept people away from their communities. By the late days of summer, more than 100 days of protests over George Floyd’s murder and clashes between protesters and federal officers in Portland had frayed the city’s image and deepened political divides. Many people sought sanctuary in Oregon’s outdoors that year.
Then the sky started to turn red.
That summer, Oregon was a tinderbox, dried out by years of intermittent drought. As Labor Day weekend approached, weather officials took note of the unusual forecast for hurricane force winds and warned of dangerous fire conditions. Some power companies braced for the worst and turned off their power lines ahead of time. All it would take to ignite a fire was a spark — and there were sparks aplenty.
Witnesses south of Ashland called police to report an arsonist lighting fires. In the Santiam Canyon, high winds downed power lines and sent sparks flying as embers from the nearby Beachie Creek Fire kicked up and drifted miles through the air. In Washington County, a campfire on private property began to spread. A lightning-sparked fire that had smoldered for weeks on the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Indian Reservation blew up as hot, dry winds fueled its spread.
Even regions of the state safe from the flames could not escape the fires’ reach. Smoke tinted skies orange and choked the air with soot, prompting air quality alerts that broke historic records. Residents of New York and Washington, D.C., expressed concern as their skies darkened from smoke drifting across the country.
By one tally, some 16 fires that charred a thousand or more acres each were burning simultaneously across Oregon by the end of the weekend, with devastating and unprecedented consequences. The Almeda Fire destroyed more than 2,600 homes in Talent, Phoenix, Medford and Ashland. The South Obenchain Fire burned 33 other Jackson County homes. Three roaring fires merged into a conflagration in the Santiam Canyon, destroying 1,500 structures and decimating Detroit. In the McKenzie River corridor, the Holiday Farm Fire razed thousands of structures and wiped out most of the community of Blue River.
With so much of the state aflame, there were not enough firefighting resources in Oregon that weekend to respond to it all.
“This could be the greatest loss of human lives and property due to wildfire in our state’s history,” Gov. Kate Brown said on Sept. 9, 2020, as the state began to grapple with the scale of the loss.
Survivors filled evacuation centers and hotels, or bunked with friends and family, and began the long journey to rebuilding their lives.
Rebuilding, resilience and blame
As soon as the scope of the crisis became clear, Oregonians stepped up to help. A group of cyclists brought food and water to Talent and Phoenix as supplies ran low. Community members brought water, blankets, food and animal feed to the Linn County fairgrounds where evacuated Mill City residents sought help.
But good will and community support went only so far. In Blue River, which was nearly leveled by the 2020 fires, the hills are still charred and not even half the 500 homes that were destroyed have been rebuilt, according to KLCC. The manufactured homes built for survivors of the Almeda Fire were later deemed uninhabitable, prompting the state to sue the manufacturers, according to Jefferson Public Radio.
As communities have worked to rebuild, some focused on resilience. Latino and Indigenous community members displaced by the Almeda Fire have banded together to build a resident-owned community for survivors, Coalicion Fortaleza. McKenzie River Trust has been working to restore a fire-damaged ecosystem and to make it more resilient to future wildfires.
Others wanted accountability. Residents of Gates, Oregon — which was hit hard by the Santiam Canyon fires — started asking questions about Pacific Power’s failure to turn off its electric lines ahead of Labor Day wind storms. They were among the first to sue the power company. Thousands of others followed.
Pacific Power has paid out more than 2,000 claims associated with 2020 Labor Day fires, totaling more than $550 million owed to fire survivors. Other litigation continues, including a federal lawsuit over the company’s role in sparking the Archie Creek Fire, which burned on federal land in Douglas County.
What has changed
Five years later, much has changed and much remains the same. Oregon’s wildfire risk continues to worsen.
In 2024, Oregon broke new records with 2.4 million acres burned, this time largely in Eastern Oregon. It was the state’s most expensive fire season ever. Fewer homes and lives were lost than in 2020, but that’s because the flames ignited in remote areas and less populated corners of the state. The devastation in those communities still lingers.
Wildfire risk is a reality state lawmakers have tried to grapple with, but it’s also a problem they have not been able to solve. In December 2024, the Legislature had to convene for a one-day special session just to find a way to pay for the previous summer’s firefighting bills.
Despite some legislators’ hopes that Oregon would chart a path toward stably funding wildfire fighting and prevention efforts this year, they took only small steps in this year’s session, leaving some of the biggest policy and financial challenges that wildfires pose unsolved.
Federal actions are adding to those challenges. The Trump administration has rescinded and scaled back funding for fire mitigation programs. And federal job cuts have left the U.S. Forest Service with fewer firefighters.
This year’s fire season has been manageable so far. The Rowena Fire destroyed 56 homes in June but the damage from fires since then has been more limited than the 2024 season.
Forecasts suggest the state will continue to see hotter than average temperatures this summer, however, and much of the state is in drought. In July, Gov. Tina Kotek declared a wildfire state of emergency that will continue through the calendar year.
“We have to be prepared for worsening conditions,” Kotek said.
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.