Lane Regional Air Protection Agency wants people to know there may be some supervised, prescribed burns near Eugene and Springfield as early as this week or next.
LRAPA spokesperson Travis Knudsen said the exact date of the burns depends on a variety of factors.
“There’s no consideration of how potentially dry the fuels are," he said. "It’s just a matter of, from a wildfire perspective, that the resources are there to keep the burn, the controlled burn in control and then the meteorological conditions: the wind’s blowing in a very favorable direction in general, we don’t have any air stagnation taking place.”
Knudsen said because those factors are ever-changing, LRAPA won’t know a burn is happening until 24 to 48 hours beforehand. He said ecological fires are low-intensity and help restore native habitats and clear vegetation to reduce wildfire risk.
Some of the more visible areas scheduled for controlled burns include the Coburg Hills, Mount Pisgah, Willow Creek south of 18th Avenue in west Eugene, and parcels on Greenhill Road out to Fern Ridge Reservoir.
The goal is to complete the burns by the end of the year.
A map of the scheduled ecological burns is here.
