Been many years but I remember him trying to get Opal Creek protected. Atiyeh is a fairly well known name as his father, Vic, was gov (R) in the 70's. If he was active in the anti-logging movement since then pretty sure his name would have been used.

I guess he had seen something, that he thought, was more valuable than cheap 2 X 4's and plywood , may he RIP !

Was it worth more than his life ?

To George Atiyeh—a logger-turned-environmentalist from a prominent Oregon family—Opal Creek is a church, and his willingness to use every means necessary to protect it from cutting—including media manipulation, state and federal legislation, and endless legal maneuvers against the US Forest Service—made him a contemptible turncoat in the eyes of his hometown community of Mill City.

Don't know the guy. But apparently his name has been out there for quite a while.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/david-seideman/showdown-at-opal-creek/

To George Atiyeh—a logger-turned-environmentalist from a prominent Oregon family—Opal Creek is a church, and his willingness to use every means necessary to protect it from cutting—including media manipulation, state and federal legislation, and endless legal maneuvers against the US Forest Service—made him a contemptible turncoat in the eyes of his hometown community of Mill City.

I get that. But it is (was?) a gorgeous spot. Hell, I'm all for logging. Got relatives who lives up river from Mill City. Spent a summer as a teenager working up there when the mill in Idahna was going 24hrs a day. I have the utmost respect for loggers, mill workers, etc. Most of my oldest friends families were either working in the woods as loggers or forest service. I believe that what Clinton did with the spotted owl was criminal.

But some places shouldn't be logged and Opal creek was one of them.

Again this isn't because of lack of logging. Fires that move 30 miles in a day don't give a [bleep] about clear cuts or thinning. This was a once in a lifetime wind event when temps were high and humidity was low.

What do you know, you live in OR. No doubt, you personally allowed Kate to be elected. That Mayor of Potlandia too.

Your opinion is valued only slightly less than that of a Californio. No matter how well founded.

I own 5 chainsaws and have cut tens of thousands of trees, yet there are places that are more valuable than the timber that they produce, there is no timber shortage in this country, actually we export timber.

As Americans we are lucky to have the natural treasures that we do have, just as we all own these treasures, we should all have a say in protecting them as well, this guy felt strongly about protecting this place, I will never see it but from the videos it does look pretty special , and I hope the regrowth is just as spectacular seed that they will grow from, and may those who love it, see it return to all of its glory !

You're a grandfathered in Oregonian, Geno.

And who's looking for him ?

I’d not gloat about anyone’s death by fire, ‘specially as this guy might not have been your average Loony Leftist. I’ll note he saved one place that others agree was worth saving.

Dunno anything else about the guy.

OK, an arsonist setting such a fire? wouldn't upset me if they died in it.

Do we really care ?

Irony is the stupid [bleep] posted in this thread, the man did his best to protect tens of thousands of acres of prime hunting and fishing land for all to enjoy and some of you mock him, WTF Have any of you done to make the outdoors a better place for your sons or daughters ?

This man likely died trying to protect what he loved, thats something a few of you might want to set your sights on !

You're a grandfathered in Oregonian, Geno.

Irony is the stupid [bleep] posted in this thread, the man did his best to protect tens of thousands of acres of prime hunting and fishing land for all to enjoy and some of you mock him, WTF Have any of you done to make the outdoors a better place for your sons or daughters ?

This man likely died trying to protect what he loved, thats something a few of you might want to set your sights on !

Does this package include a non-extraditable warrant and the inability to think for yourself?

Irony is the stupid [bleep] posted in this thread, the man did his best to protect tens of thousands of acres of prime hunting and fishing land for all to enjoy and some of you mock him, WTF Have any of you done to make the outdoors a better place for your sons or daughters ?

This man likely died trying to protect what he loved, thats something a few of you might want to set your sights on !

Too bad it wasn't Andy Kerr.

Let me get this straight. If they logged it it would no longer be good for hunting and fishing?

jimy

The man doggedly tried to preserve the place in a static way, no tree removed, no leaf unturned, etc. This is impossible. The earth is an ever changing landscape, erosion, flood, volcanic flows/explosions, torrential rains, mudslides, and of course fire will alter the earth. Perhaps with careful thoughtful forestry management that magnificent forest would have fared better from the torch. If that fire has ravished that forest it will take decades if not centuries to ever return if it ever does. What will happen to those crystal waters now?

Get with it Val, sometimes the only way to save ANYTHING is to fire up the chainsaws and make some money creating defensible space. My heart is not broken over this, in fact, if Atiyeh in fact was immolated, there's a certain bitter justice. Too bad it wasn't Andy Kerr.

You're just grumpy because Caucasians have returned to Zimbabwe.

You guys realize trees have the ability to reproduce, right?

You guys realize trees have the ability to reproduce, right?

On that I agree.

That said, when you're in the center of a town that burns every house to the ground (Talent, Detroit) how do you make a defensible space? My relatives restaurant in Detroit was surrounded by hundreds of feet of back-top (roads, hwy, parking lot). Hard to get more defensible than that. Only thing left is the sign in the middle of the parking lot. We had 35-65 mph winds. You can't defend against that.

Detroit - where????

Does this package include a non-extraditable warrant and the inability to think for yourself?

You want me, you're going to have to come and get me!

It would add roads and easy access that was never there.

The book you want to Read is "Something of Value" It is a great read and an eye opener, Robert Ruark was one of the best writers ever.

Maybe we aughta cleacut that f*cking Kings Canyon? How about that wasteland Yellowstone? Lets f*cking open up Glacier! Piss on it go go go go! God damnit people are f*cking starving! Cut the damned Redwoods down! Highlead right up elCapitan! F*ck yah! Salmon River, Bob Marshall, cut cut cut!
Carry on.

Maybe we aughta cleacut that f*cking Kings Canyon? How about that wasteland Yellowstone? Lets f*cking open up Glacier! Piss on it go go go go! God damnit people are f*cking starving! Cut the damned Redwoods down! Highlead right up elCapitan! F*ck yah! Salmon River, Bob Marshall, cut cut cut!
Carry on.

Highlead el Capital... LMAO!!

Central Park in NY has some dandy oak trees just sayin..

Highlead el Capital... LMAO!!

Central Park in NY has some dandy oak trees just sayin..

I get ya Boomer. Have a beer.

Karma's a bitch

We need to have a beer together some time.

Won't argue that Dave. In some circumstances the best way too.

But, I think the man wanted to preserve (yep, there's that sometimes nasty word) a particular portion of a system that was rapidly disappearing. THAT can't be done by logging it. Big trees like that will not grow back in your children's lifetime, their grandkids lifetimes, or even their grandkids grandkids lifetimes. Maybe take that section of forest he wanted to preserve and surround it with a bare dirt buffer 500' wide? Log that buffer and put in a lawn? Soccer fields maybe?

The sad fact of the matter is some folks want to see groves of trees and sections of forest that are relatively untouched by man since before the modern calendar started. Others see those forests as jobs and houses and paper pulp.

Jimy made a very valid point. If there's truly a shortage of lumber products in the US of A, why do I have pictures of barges loaded with logs and ready to go downriver to Japan? And that's just on the Columbia, not counting Coos Bay, places in AK, and Puget Sound. Would not all those logs make good wood products for the US of A, and maybe there would be a few more jobs here? Maybe we wouldn't have to import wood products from Canada?

I, for one, am really glad his predecessors in preserving big trees did such a good job with Redwood State and National Parks. Having spent multiple days there, being as how I lived in the area, I can tell everyone that's never seen one there is nothing, repeat nothing, like it in any area that's been logged. Having worked for a few years on 350,000+ acres of private timberlands I kinda know what I'm talking about there. And I've seen preserved areas in PA, WA, OR and AK, so I'd have to say the guy likely did the OR public a service in saving that particular patch of woods.

Could be they're all gone now? Yep. Could be whether man was involved or not, that section of woods could have gone up in any dry year. Odds of those trees standing through a fire event are a lot higher than them standing through a chainsaw event though.

I'll have to look up the Kerr dude. Don't know of him offhand.

Enjoy your evening up there.

Not so sure. Fires are more apt to settle down in old growth. More problems with the poorly managed 2nd and 3rd growth, and urban interface areas. But, yah f*ck, Muir, Leupold, Roosevelt, Shelton, Pulaski etal, fugging doogooders.

You big greenie, you!

I came to Idaho in 1983. Hunted all but seven years since then (college years). Did not see “old growth” forest until 2012 and it literally took my breath away. Ponderosa pines, no more than 7 or 8 to the acre, elk meadows, stunning. To walk out of dog hair pine into an open parkland like that is one of my most memorable experiences.

The only reason it exists is that it was about 100 acres on the Black Bird mine property, and didn’t get logged with the rest of it. And I loved hunting the rest of it, shot my first 6 point bull the next ridge over. But those ponderosas were something special.

I’m ok with not cutting it all. The boys in Alabama got lots of white pine that needs cutting.

There are ways to log land without turning it to crap.

[/quote]

Let me get this straight. If they logged it it would no longer be good for hunting and fishing?

If you don't cut that stuff the Oregon fire bug commies will toss Molotov cocktails right smack dab in the middle of it and you end up with what you got right now.
e's a war going on in Oregon between the tree hugging commies and the molotov cocktail commies.

So far, the tree hugging commies seem to be suckin' hind tit in the matter.

Indeed. And generally speaking this was not done for the first 100 years of logging in the PNW. What's been needed for the past 4 decades, is overcoming that legacy, using the tools and knowledge we now have rather than cutting the remaining ancient groves. Man, there's a lifetime of timber out here on our public lands without touching anything over 150 years old.

Kentucky folk can only dream of such wilderness

Hell there aren't even mills that can handle big logs anymore. And then we export the good stuff and get the Home Depot chit. Dag burnit!


How about a Guinness NA? LOL

The sound of chain saws and “beep-beep” of a logger sending the carriage in the mountains makes me smile.

😎

General comments. Sigh.

Yes indeed the influx of people has phucqked. Oregon to the point of having that khuunt Kate. It's phucqking sad.


Yet the geology climate flora and fauna (etc) are still, hard to argue otherwise, most awesome... The list would be thread worthy in itself and beyond my scope this evening.


When anyone, inbred or otherwise, has any evidence that fires were intentionally set, in Oregon old growth this past week, please post it up. Obviously, some have been around little of the sort to have valuable insights. Carry-on.

The sound of chain saws and “beep-beep” of a logger sending the carriage in the mountains makes me smile.

😎

Fugg that steep chit, I'm staying in the truck!

Oh, I made a whole bunch more money when they were flying logs around on the bottom of a copter!

General comments. Sigh.

Yes indeed the influx of people has phucqked. Oregon to the point of having that khuunt Kate. It's phucqking sad.


Yet the geology climate flora and fauna (etc) are still, hard to argue otherwise, most awesome... The list would be thread worthy in itself and beyond my scope this evening.


When anyone, inbred or otherwise, has any evidence that fires were intentionally set, in Oregon old growth this past week, please post it up. Obviously, some have been around little of the sort to have valuable insights. Carry-on.

You know the routine. California is a cesspool. No actually it is an awesome place with too many people.

Oregon is a chit hole. No, it's actually pretty f'ing awesome with too many people.


Texas sucks. No, not all of it.


Ohio blows........ Uhhhh


Kentucky ain't chit. No it kinda ok for what it is.


Florida is great. LOL

Montana sucks libral governor! Frozen SOB too.

Wyoming blows. That's the wind, duhhh.

.

Sure,,,,until you see horns...Then it’s game face time.

😬😎

Thanks for the humor. Been a tough week
Missing Oregon little. Then remebered my concurrent 2 elk, 3 deer, 2 Antelope, bear, cougar, and wolf "tags". . Sigh.

Now I’m sad...

One deer, one bull, one depredations cow elk...I didn’t draw chit outta state.

Pheasant and duck hunting will keep me in camo.

Good Luck this season Boom.

😎

Here's a Portland cutie for the album.

I can’t imagine watching someone do this to their face without me calling 911 for Police and Fire to take her on a 72 hour mental hold.

Fug’n crazy chick!

😎

This requires further explanation on how helicopter logging put additional greenbacks into your pocket.

😎🤷🏽‍♀️

The Molotov cocktail commies can burn the whole state down,..and everybody in Oregon will just shake their heads and say, "Them dadburn old power lines again".

Pacific Coast denial is in a class by itself.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/four...ildfires-in-california-oregon-washington

The Molotov cocktail commies can burn the whole state down,..and everybody in Oregon will just shake their heads and say, "Them dadburn old power lines again".

Pacific Coast denial is in a class by itself.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/four...ildfires-in-california-oregon-washington

Four People Arrested For Suspected Arson, Intentionally Setting Wildfires In California, Oregon, Washington

I'm involved with the group of wild land fire fighters that is fighting one of the large fires in Oregon (Archie Creek). We average about 6 arson caused fires per year out of an average of 76 human caused fires per year. This is an average over the last 10 years. We have seen an increase in power line caused fires over the years and so far this year we have had 10 (so far). So arson isn't new, either here or in any other state. I don't know if any of these people (other than the guy in Washington) is Antifa related, but I do believe they all have mental problems and are often homeless.

I do find it frustrating how the media puts out confusing information. Take this quote from the article above:

"Michael Jarrod Bakkela, a transient living in the Oregon woods, was arrested late this week “on two counts of arson, 15 counts of criminal mischief and 14 counts of reckless endangerment,” according to Oregon Live. Bakkela is allegedly responsible for setting one of two major wildfires in Oregon; the fires have now merged, killing at least 24 people, leaving hundreds homeless, and torching at least 5,700 acres of precious forest land".

This is from a September 12 article. He actually set a fire during the Alameda fire (which had already been burning for about 6 hours). The fire he set was in Phoenix, so by that time the fire had burned from Ashland, through Talent and to Phoenix (about 5 miles). How much his fire contributed to the overall destruction will never be known, but he did not set off the Alameda fire. They are currently investigating whether the Alameda fire was arson started in relation to a homicide. Furthermore, the Alameda fire has not merged with any other fire (it is essentially out), it did not kill at least 24 people and by September 12 the 6 or 7 major fires in Oregon had consumed over 500,000 acres.

We do know that when we have large fires, we seem to also have a real uptick in copy cat arson incidents. My personal belief is that we are far too lenient with arsonist and those that negligently start fires (the local Stouts Creek and Milepost 97 fires are example).

You guys listen up Bristoe tellin you how it works in the woods in the PNW. Cutting edge stuff. The Kentucky visionary is on it LMAO!!

You live in a foreign country. Why are you even involving yourself in a discussion of the U.S.A.?

Dude as far as the reality out here you are on another planet

,....and I wouldn't have it any other way.

okay,.....but keep the garden hose hooked up anyway.

So we can agree on that. Probably time to STFU about it then.

okay,.....but keep the garden hose hooked up anyway.

Oh,...I'd just as soon not. I'm a resident of the U.S.A.

I say what I want. Especially to nosy ass Canadians who won't mind their own business.

A fuggin' soyboy whiffenpoof runs your country. So explain to me why what you think regarding the U.S.A. matters?

I'm from BC. , we deal with forest fires regularly. Logging isn't going to stop them. What's needed around built up areas is fuel removal. It's expensive and labour intensive.

The section from Lost Lake to the summit is heartbreaking every time I go over it....

Bob

Yes,but it was fantastic deer hunting for awhile..

The most common word being used to describe Oregon’s ongoing wildfire cataclysm is “unprecedented.”

That’s certainly the case in modern recorded history when it comes to the sheer number of conflagrations and megafires that erupted starting Labor Day. A powerful windstorm caused fires to race through Oregon’s typically more fire-resistant forests on the west side of the Cascades for 72 hours.

When the damage is eventually tallied, the number of structures lost and evacuees will dwarf any previous total in the history of the state by orders of magnitude. The number of acres burned over just a week is likely to surpass annual statewide totals from even the largest fire seasons of the past. And more tragically, the loss of life, as Gov. Kate Brown warned Wednesday, may be the largest ever experienced.

Yet while last week’s hellfire was unusual, it was not, in fact, unprecedented.

The “east wind event” that conspired with existing drought conditions to blow up two low-level fires and other human-caused ignitions last Monday is rare but hardly unique, academics and fire experts say. The winds were the main culprit in making the catastrophic infernos as fast moving as they were.

Experts say those east winds are Oregon’s version of the dry, downslope Santa Ana winds that stoke big fires in California. They have long blamed them for some of the largest westside fires in modern Oregon history and say similar wind-driven megafires have shaped the entire ecosystem west of the Cascades over millennia.

Neither the wind event nor the fires were unpredictable. The windstorm and resulting fire danger were forecast days in advance, but with little appreciable effect.

Moreover, scientists have long pointed to the inverse relationship between fire frequency and severity on the west side – that is, fewer fires can mean more intense fires -- and they warn that fire is moving west to the overgrown forests and population centers of the Willamette Valley and southwest Oregon in an age of global warming.

That recognition, however, has spurred little movement beyond the established battle lines that have characterized forestry debate in Oregon for decades. The prospect of widespread forest treatments in the complex ecosystems of the west side – establishing fire breaks and using thinning and prescribed burns to reduce the fuels that choke forest floors – is environmentally unthinkable to some, and impractical to others.

That leaves Oregon facing the paradox of relying on full fire suppression. But leaping on every fire and putting it out immediately is the practice that helped create the problem in the first place.

Alternatively, Oregon can turn to other, easier measures. It could adopt policies requiring more frequent pre-emptive blackouts by utilities so that downed power lines do not spark fires. Or the state could force updated building codes, regulations on defensible space near structures, and incorporate wildfire risk in land-use planning and zoning.

But those policies won’t stop big fires and are contentious, too. And in a legislative session shortened by a Republican walkout over climate change legislation, none of them gained ground. Bills to expand forest treatments across the state, as well as legislation to modernize and bolster the Oregon Department of Forestry’s ability to put down wildfires quickly, went nowhere.

It’s possible that the sheer scale of this week’s tragedy will reframe and accelerate the debate. But if so, the problems will compete with COVID-19 for a strapped state budget, with poor prospects for major new investments.

“We’re sobered right now,” said Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, who chaired the Legislature’s Committee on Wildfire Preparedness and whose district encompasses some of the most catastrophically impacted communities in the state. “But in the past we’ve been sobered and I haven’t seen us come together around the causes we have to address.”

East wind events:

The strong and persistent windstorm that started Monday and stoked the big fires is unusual, but academics say similar conditions were a prime factor in many of the most infamous, fast-running west-side conflagrations since Europeans settled in Oregon.

Those include the 1902 Yacolt Burn, which torched 500,000 acres in Southwest Washington and parts of Oregon and killed at least 65 people. Easterly gales were a main ingredient in the Tillamook Burn of 1933, which initially burned 40,000 acres west of Gales Creek over 10 days, then devoured an additional 200,000 acres in 20 hours when stoked by hot east winds. East winds were also implicated in the Bandon fire of 1936, which burned 143,000 acres, consumed the town of 1,800 and killed at least 10 people.

In 1957, Owen Cramer, a meteorologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Pacific Northwest Research Station, authored a paper describing the close relationship between occurrences of severe easterly winds and large forest fires in northwest Oregon and southwest Washington.

“The history of forest conflagrations in the Northwest is, for the most part, a history of the simultaneous occurrence of small fires and severe east winds,” he wrote, going on to describe the exact weather pattern that took place on Labor Day. “Under these conditions fires run wild and fire-control men must be prepared for the worst.”

Daniel Donato, a natural resource scientist at Washington Department of Natural Resources, is currently studying the relationship between east wind events and large fires. He says there’s ample precedent and it’s fair to say it’s characteristic of the landscape west of the Cascades.

He likens it to the recent awakening around the likelihood of a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake. “We get lulled into this sense that it doesn’t happen here. It’s a California problem. But it does happen here, with low frequency,” he said.

Dan Gavin is a geographer at the University of Oregon who studies the history and pattern of fires in wet forest types west of the Cascade Range. He says the best evidence of pre-European, west-side megafires comes from core samples of remaining old-growth trees in protected areas and tree-ring studies in stumps from 1980s clearcuts. Coupled with sediment studies, they show that big fires have been a constant presence on the landscape for at least 11,000 years, leaving uniformly aged stands of Douglas-fir across Western Oregon and Washington at intervals of 100 to 250 years.

In the hierarchy of factors that dictate how fast and far a fire will burn – fuels, topography and weather – wind speed and direction are key drivers. And since those fires have no obvious ignition source, he says, they were likely either “lightning holdovers” or fires set by indigenous tribes along hunting routes that smoldered for days to weeks before a hot and persistent east wind kicked up, bellowing the fires and preventing the typical nighttime increase in relative humidity that comes with normal westerly marine flows.

That’s what happened Monday. Two fires – Beachie Creek and Lionshead – had been burning for weeks in steep terrain. By late August, Beachie Creek was small enough that forestry officials reassigned scarce resources to other, higher-priority fires. On Monday night and Tuesday morning, however, high winds pushed down drainages from the crest of the Cascades, gaining temperature as they drove toward the valley floor. Both fires exploded, with Beachie Creek making a spectacular 55-mile run of flame toward the valley. Together, they formed a 313,000-acre behemoth by Friday.

Similar scenarios played out to the north and south.

The idea of human-set fire is also apt. Most of the fires burning in Western Oregon today were not caused by lightning, which doesn’t occur during the atmospheric conditions in place Monday. Officials have yet to identify the cause for most of the blazes, saying they are under investigation. But with population increases, particularly in what fire experts call the wildland-urban interface, 70 percent of fires in Oregon today are human caused, and earlier this summer, the percentage was 90 percent, according the Oregon Department of Forestry.

Academics are reluctant to attribute any one event to human-caused climate change. But there is broad consensus that climate change is driving higher temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns and drought cycles across the west and in Western Oregon.

“Climate change is loading the dice,” Donato said. “It’s deepening and lengthening summer drought. Loading that one die is part of the west-side fire equation.”

A 2019 report by the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute found that fire risk due to climate change is projected to increase across the state by mid-century, with the largest increases in the Willamette Valley and Eastern Oregon.

Likewise, a 2019 risk assessment by the Governor’s Council on Wildfire Response specifically identified areas of Clackamas, Marion and Lane counties as well as much of Southwest Oregon as areas of high and increasing wildfire risk.

Patrick Bartlein, another University of Oregon geographer whose research includes environmental modeling, says making the connection between a particular wind event and climate change is tricky to do. But ingredients of the atmospheric setup for Monday’s windstorm can be related to global change, he said, including the eastern Pacific Ocean being 5 degrees warmer this summer than the 30-year average, which heats the atmosphere and reinforces the weather pattern that caused it.

“A lot of the components of that event are consistent with human-caused climate change,” he said.

Reacting, now and in the future

If more frequent fire is coming to Western Oregon, it raises the question of what can be done, immediately and in the future.

Authorities and residents in the Santiam Canyon, along the McKenzie River and in Clackamas County were uniformly caught off guard by the freakish speed of the fires' advance, despite clear weather warnings. And some residents said evacuation notices came late, if at all.

The National Weather Service was issuing hazardous fire weather warnings Friday, Sept. 4, calling for warm, dry and windy conditions between the next Monday and Wednesday.

They repeated high fire danger warning Saturday Sept. 5: “It’s going to be quite warm again next week. But the big story is increased fire danger due to strong east winds and a very dry air mass. Fire starts have the potential to be very active and spread quickly.”

The agency’s “urgent fire weather” message for the region came again Sunday, Sept. 6, at 3 p.m.: “HISTORIC SEPTEMBER EAST WIND EVENT LIKELY, PEAKING MONDAY NIGHT AND TUESDAY. EXTREMELY DRY CONDITIONS LIKELY TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY.”

By Monday morning, however, the Marion County Sheriff’s office said on its Facebook page that it was “hearing of rumors spreading in town of a possible evacuation inside the city of Detroit. There are no plans for an evacuation inside the city of Detroit at this time.”

The lake was still open. Tourists were in town. Later that night, there was no warning. The fire was there. Residents fled down Oregon 22 with flames on both sides of road.

“It was frantic,” Detroit Mayor Jim Trett told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “The calls started about midnight to evacuate. We hadn’t even been declared a Level 1 as of yet, which is just “Listen.” We went from nothing to a Level 3, and in less than 24 hours. But when they called at midnight, we had people in bed, and the way they got told it was just people pounding on their doors saying ‘get out.’”

It was similar story for Michelle Jarvis, who lives south of Estacada in Clackamas County. She said she signed up for emergency notifications on her phone as the Riverside fire loomed in the distance Tuesday morning.

“I don’t remember getting any Level 1 or 2,” she said. “I wondered if they even worked until the officer was coming down my driveway (around 4 p.m.) and telling us to leave. Then I started getting the alert. It happened super-fast.”

It’s also unclear if utilities shut their grids down early enough with pre-emptive blackouts. Electric utilities' role in causing or preventing wildfire has been a hot topic since 2018, when PG&E’s failure to stop the flow of power on a high-voltage line in Northern California caused the Camp fire, which immolated the town of Paradise and killed 84 people. Facing $18 billion in damage claims from the fire, the company filed for bankruptcy last year and ended up pleading guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter.

Oregon Public Utility Commission Chair Megan Decker issued a statement Friday addressing the potential problem.

“Downed power lines can be a source of ignition and will be examined in the formal investigations that are yet to come. At this point the PUC has no information attributing any specific wildfire to any specific Oregon utility. As with every major fire, full investigations will deliver the facts that we need to determine root causes, including information about whether utility lines were a primary ignition source.”

Local utilities have been honing their wildfire preparedness ever since the Camp fire, increasing vegetation management, replacing wooden poles, upgrading grids to react more quickly and communicating with customers about the potential for “public safety power outages.”

With the wind forecast in place Saturday, Sept. 5, Portland General Electric started preparing for its first ever fire prevention blackout for customers on Mount Hood. It warned local officials, then sent out customer notifications the next day. And at 7:15 p.m. on Monday, it pulled the plug, cutting off power for roughly 5,000 customers from Alder Creek to Government Camp.

PacifiCorp, which serves customers up the Santiam Canyon, did not do the same, and there are unconfirmed reports that downed power lines may have exacerbated existing fires in that area.

The utility issued a statement Wednesday, saying it was working with local and state authorities to investigate fire causes, but that pre-emptive blackouts need to meet very specific criteria based on “historical fire behavior, topology, wind speed and directionality, fuel loading, and current local situations like community evacuations.”

“Shutting off power to our service territory in advance of the event could have created more issues for suppression and evacuation efforts,” the statement said.

Two public utilities, Lane Electric Cooperative and Eugene Water and Electric Board, serve customers along the McKenzie River, where fire causes are still under investigation.

The former, which serves the devastated town of Blue River, began to get multiple outage calls Monday evening, possibly because of high winds, and ultimately elected to shut down its lines early Tuesday morning, said Jonathan Farmer, a spokesman. It brought its grid partially back online Tuesday only to shut it down again Tuesday night amid deteriorating conditions.

“We don’t have any idea what that cause was,” he said. “We hope it wasn’t us, but we await results” of an investigation.

EWEB, which serves customers down the valley, from the community of Vida and below, said it was watching the weather but didn’t institute any pre-emptive blackouts. It started seeing spot outages in its service territory along the river Monday night and took several substations and the customers they serve down about 8:30 p.m. By Tuesday morning, it shut off the rest of its McKenzie River substations.

“We’ll learn from this and we’ll probably refine our plans,” said Joe Harwood, a utility spokesman. “Theoretically we could be even more pre-emptive.”

It’s not a popular decision among customers. Even in Northern California, where people have fresh memories of one of the worst utility-caused tragedies in decades, the public outcry over subsequent pre-emptive blackouts by PG&E has been intense, said Matt Donegan, who chaired the Council on Wildfire Response that Gov. Kate Brown set up in Jan. 2019 to address the state’s burgeoning wildfire risks and skyrocketing costs.

Nevertheless, he said he fully expects we’re going to see a lot more of them. “It’s going to be a very common practice, because of climate change, because of the vegetative problems. But I think we’re going to see a lot of public pushback on that.”

And that lack of public consensus is the issue around the most common strategies to deal with wildfire risk.

Take forest thinning and similar measures. The wood products industry and representatives from rural communities are big supporters of this strategy because of the jobs and revenues it would bring.

Meanwhile, Donato and other researchers suggest that treating big portions of the west side forests through thinning, prescribed burns and other fuel reduction efforts is an impractical, Sisyphean task.

The scale of the problem is so vast, Donato said, and the forests so biologically productive, that “even if we somehow miraculously caught up with fuels reduction on the west side, it would grow back in a matter of years. It’s not even relevant to the west side. It doesn’t even need to be a conversation.”

For conservationists, meanwhile, the prospect of meddling in the complex ecosystems of the west side forests is unthinkable. Oregonians value them as they are, aesthetically, as carbon sinks, for clean water, wildlife and recreation. They also suggest that the value of treatments in all but the most vulnerable communities is minimal, because the percentage of wildfires that actually encounter a treatment is extremely low.

Donegan says he’s not sure there’s absolute consensus around that conclusion. But after living through the public debate around one of the council’s chief recommendations, spending $4 billion over 20 years to treat 5.6 million acres of forest and grasslands, he acknowledges that it’s off the table for now, on the west side at least.

“It’s the third rail,” he said.

There was plenty of discussion about competing bills from the governor and Sen. Herman Baertschiger, R-Grants Pass, to beef up and modernize the Department of Forestry’s firefighting capabilities, adding more bodies, buying or leasing new equipment and rejiggering its dysfunctional system for paying its exploding fire costs.

They died too.

It is feasible that Oregonians can agree on some of the wildfire mitigation and adaptation strategies that the council recommended. Among many others, they include updating building codes, increasing enforceable requirements on defensible space, incorporating wildfire risk in land-use planning and zoning.

But those recommendations aren’t universally popular either. Should the requirements apply to new construction vs. retrofits of existing homes? How to assure low-income communities benefit? Do you adopt penalties for neighbors who don’t comply with defensible space?

The major selling point of the council’s recommendations was that the state can save money, forestland, lives and communities in the long run by making investments and sensible policy changes now.

“I thought the entire council engaged in good critical thinking,” Donegan said. “They were intellectually honest and took off their partisan hats. It was a big tent approach. Then you get to the legislative process and a lot of those more familiar battle lines reemerged. That was obviously very disappointing.”

Here's a Portland cutie for the album.

Yes,but it was fantastic deer hunting for awhile..

The first couple of sentences in the article says that the fires are indeed unprecedented,..exactly the opposite of what the headline reads.

When the damage is eventually tallied, the number of structures lost and evacuees will dwarf any previous total in the history of the state by orders of magnitude. The number of acres burned over just a week is likely to surpass annual statewide totals from even the largest fire seasons of the past.

Maybe a new thread is in order for folks with personal experience in forests?

Real forests?
or are you including tree farms?

And large landscapes and stuff?

How about trees along the fence line out of reach from the sickle mower? They got birds and everything in them.

If they been there 20 years we can classify them as Old Growth right?

The facial art is totally unnecessary. You can clearly see the crazy in the eyes.

Haven't seen a spotted owl on my place yet and I'm too far inland for marbled murrelets. All the stuff on my place is also older than this 60yo. Except the balck berries. I kill them every year and they are born again in the Spring.

Crazy eyes, but the sharpie marks is for the purpose of defeating facial recognition technology.

I have some questions about how to lessen wild fires. I've heard that in Slick Willy Clinton's terms as Prez, the greenies got a lot of legislation passed that stopped the logging and that's when the price of lumber went through the roof. And this added fuel to the fires because it took away the fire breaks. How true is this? I mean I can see it, it makes common sense.

Now on face book there is an article that is preaching controlled burns to reduce dry leaves and scrubs on the ground which add fuel to wildfires. They also help control tree diseases and kill invasive plants. There's so much CONTROLLED BURNS and CONTROLLED LOGGING will benefit the forests and people that live in and around them.(Why did they quit calling them forest fires? That's what they are, forest fires. Maybe some greenie BS. But they are FOREST FIRES. A wild fire could be in town.)

I mean I can see all this as good conservation. Why do the Greenie Tree Huggers oppose it? I mean if it's about the spotted owl hell they gotta know one of these fires probably kills hundreds of them. If you cut a tree down the owl will fly off and find another tree. It's common sense, unless someone on here knows a good reason against it. These people must be truly looney, and not the good kind of looney that goes with guns. WHY!