Sean C. Morgan
The heavy rains over the past few weeks on Oct. 11 put an end to a busy but mild fire season and regulated use restrictions in the Oregon Department of Forestry Sweet Home Unit.
The Sweet Home Unit protects private and U.S. Bureau of Land Management timber in the Sweet Home area. It is part of the South Cascades District.
It’s been a busy year, said Unit Forester Craig Pettinger. The Sweet Home Unit responded to 105 calls throughout the fire season.
Of those, 20 were considered “stat fires,” a call where responding firefighters took significant action.
Last year, it responded to 71 calls, of which, 15 were considered stat fires.
The largest fire this year was a quarter acre late in the season along Trout Creek Road, off Quartzville Road.
The fire was caused by a rogue lightning strike away from a thunderstorm.
“That was the only one we flew a helicopter on,” Pettinger said. “The lion’s share of the rest of the calls were human-caused.”
One or two were caused by power lines, Pettinger said. Many of the non-stat fires were either illegal burns, and in many other cases, firefighters were unable to locate a fire.
The stat fires often were caused by activities that violated regulated use, like mowing, he said.
“One of the things we did this year was graduated regulated use based on fire danger,” Pettinger said, with activities permitted based on the level of fire danger.
Most of the problems seemed to occur outside that hot and dry (period),” he said, and “when we did get lightning, it came fairly wet.”
While the Sweet Home Unit had more calls for service than last year, the area days of total shutdowns for logging, he said. In fact, the late-season fire on Trout Creek was spotted by a watchman on a logging site.
The woods had been reopened to logging the day before.
“We were lucky in a lot of ways,” Pettinger said. “The fires we did have were reported quickly.”
It shows an awareness of fire danger among the public, he said.
Again, as has been the case for several years, the Sweet Home Unit didn’t have serious fires while surrounding areas did, especially on the national forest.
“We were surrounded, essentially,” Pettinger said. To the east were fires in the Jefferson and Sisters wildernesses. Both encroached into Linn County.
Overall, East Lane did all right during the fire season; but it had a couple of larger fires, in the Coburg Hills, Mohawk and Shotgun Creek area that barely crossed into Linn County, the southern border of the Sweet Home Unit. The Lebanon area had a large fire in the Mount Hope area early in the season.
Big challenges, like the eclipse, which occurred immediately after the Willamette Country Music Festival outside of Brownsville, turned out to be non-events, Pettinger said.
“It was busy but not overtaxing,” Pettinger said. “We stayed busy all summer. I’l hand it to my guys. They were top notch getting to the fires and getting them little.”