A New Wave of Wildfires Is Punishing Oregon and Washington

When I woke up this morning it was a pleasant day: dry, cool air, blue sky. Then, by lunchtime, the ring of mountains surrounding my valley home in the Cascades of southern Washignton had begun to fade. The sky took on a sickly yellow hue, and the air turned acrid. Wildfire.

Or, more accurately, wildfires, plural. Last night the states of Oregon and Washington were hit abruptly with a new wave of fires courtesy of widespread lightning. This complicates an already quite dire wildfire map, featuring one of the country's largest current blazes in central Oregon on the Warm Springs Reservation along with a collection of fires consuming the forests and gold-hued steppe surrounding Washington's Mount Adams, a fire near the central Washington resort town of Chelan that's burned at least 50 houses, and yet another major fire near the eastern Oregon town of John Day.

These are just a sampling of the 29 major fires being tracked by the Northwest Coordination Center in Portland. The current Northwest fire map shows a buckshot of incidents that as of this morning were small and isolated, but tomorrow's map may look much worse, even despite a relatively mild and windless day.

The situation is being compounded by a lack of fire-fighting resources. One major fire in eastern Oregon, the Eldorado fire, is all but being ignored. "[Marvin Vetter, Oregon Department of Forestry operations section chief] and his team are charged with containing a fire that started Friday morning and grew to 10,000 acres in 24 hours," the Oregonian reports. "They had little to work with as Sunday dawned—12 engines, seven bulldozers and a lone helicopter. They had no one to work a night shift."

There isn't a shortage so much as there is an extreme overabundance of fire incidents, aided in part by the region's mild, dry winter. Our Pacific-Northwestern January looked an awful lot like a January in Southern California. Fire season was very well-primed, in other words. The region generally dries up anyway in the summer, but this year it had a head-start. Seasonal climate forecasts, however sketchy, suggest this dryness could persist into the upcoming winter, largely due to the strengthening El Nino.

The sky is looking a bit better now, which probably has a lot to do with today's unusually stagnant air (which indicates a helpful temperature inversion). Eventually these fires will be wiped or die out, but it looks like we have several more months of this to come.