Governor Kotek Declares Two More Wildfires as Conflagrations

JOHN DAY AIR BASE, Ore.–At a community meeting at the John Day Air Base, people heard about the difficulties of fighting the Rail Ridge wildfire.  Fire behavior analyst Renee Hinault described the weather.

“We had a red flag warning in the area for instability, we had lightning thunderstorms associated with it that caused erratic fire behavior.”

Cook, Wheeler and Grant Counties are under Oregon Governor Tina Kotek’s latest conflagration orders. Eric Bush with Grant County Emergency Management describes how quickly it got serious.  “It was almost, are you kidding me? This fire the first night, it blew up from 70 acres to 11, 000 acres in a matter of just a few hours. The next day it went from 11, 000 acres to over 60, 000 acres. So that’s how quickly this ramped up far as evacuations. We had level  3 evacuation zones.”

It grew to more than 100, 000 acres, threatening people’s lives and homes.  “There were 24 people and 44 structures inside the level three go now evacuation zone.  By afternoon, that went up to 354 structures and 319 people.”

He says emergency workers had to act quickly.  “Thank you to the Red Cross volunteers.  Without you folks we couldn’t do this. We had them teed up and within two hours they had a temporary evacuation point already coordinated.   And we’re able to open it up at the community hall in Mount Vernon. And about two to three hours after that, they rolled it into a full up shelter.  Now you’ve got cots and the ability to put people up overnight.”

Scott Stutzman with the state fire marshal says the fire’s threatening homes.

“There are some structures impacted by fire and we’re continuing to look at those structures and get people in there to make contact with the homeowners that are there.”

The Rail Ridge and Shoe Fly fires are the 15th and 16th emergency conflagrations that Governor Tina Kotek’s declared for Oregon this wildfire season.  They’re impacting Grant, Wheeler and Crook Counties.