An effort to open roads and create firebreaks to enable quicker access to and control of wildfires in local forests is in full stride this summer.
Known as the Potential Control Line Project, it is the result of consultations between local forestry and fire officials, with input from private landowners, to build potential control lines between privately owned forests and U.S. Forest Service property east of Sweet Home.
“You’ve got to attack fire quick,” said Milt Moran, president of Cascade Timber Consulting, which manages 145,000 acres of timberland in Linn County, much of it east of Sweet Home. “A small fire is a cheap fire, a safe fire. A big fire is expensive.”
The PCL project is a partnership between Sweet Home Fire and Ambulance District and the USFS Sweet Home Ranger District to establish “Potential Operational Delineations” and “Potential Containment Lines” in some 1,300 acres of forestland bordering and on the Sweet Home Ranger District north of Soda Fork.
In late May SHFAD representatives met with Willamette National Forest Service leaders for the first time since Sweet Home Fire’s newly established Wildland Crew began working to complete the project last fall.
Sweet Home Fire Chief Nick Tyler said the project’s goal is to build “shaded field breaks” between Forest Service and private forestlands, which involve fuels-mitigation clearing designed to reduce the intensity and spread of wildfires along roadways that border private timberlands.
“What that does, if we have a fire up there, it is a potential area to control the fire and keep its footprint as small as possible,” Tyler said.
Plus, he said, the program gives those managing firefighting efforts a big head start on controlling a blaze.
“It allows fire managers to have all this work on a map, instead of having a team scouting the area out,” he said.
That could potentially save a week or more of work by responders, because they would already know where the control lines can be, he added.
“They’ll be a week ahead of schedule. The work will be done. They’ll have it on a map.”
The May meeting, he said, gave Willamette National Forest leaders a chance to see work that is being done by SHFAD aimed at giving firefighters a better chance of getting a handle on local forest fires before they get big.
“There’s a lot that has happened,” he said. “Some of the decisions the Forest Service has made over the last couple of years, a lot of proactive actions are being taken.
Lessons Follow 2020
Tyler and Sweet Home District Ranger Nikki Swanson said the idea to create improved access and firebreaks got legs following the fires of 2020, followed by what Tyler called “atypically large fires” over the succeeding four years.
“Ever since 2020, when we saw what fires could really do here, I think it got a lot of people’s attention,” Swanson said. “When you look to the north and the south of us, what you see left today is an island of green, and we want to collectively keep the green green as long as we can.”
“That’s where the concept started,” Tyler said. “What can we do before the fire happens?”
Swanson said fire protection is a big concern for local community members she’s talked with, and that’s part of what’s prompted the PCL effort, which started with some questions: “What can we do during fire season to keep fires as small as possible? And what can we do before fire season, years ahead of time, to try to give ourselves opportunities to keep fires smaller?”
The fire break creation effort by Sweet Home Fire is the immediate answer to those questions, she said.
The Potential Control Line project’s initial focus is the area bounding the Middle Santiam Wilderness, 35 miles northeast of Sweet Home, located between Highway 20 and Quartzville Road.
That area has been an area of concern for a long time,” Swanson said. “The trees in there are really old, 400 years old, and it has really steep and deep canyons.
“You could get a firefighter in there, maybe for an initial attack on single trees. But if you get an established fire in there you can’t put people in there because you can’t safely get them back.”
Plus, Swanson said, after what happened in 2020, local officials and residents woke up to the potential for how fast and how big fires could become in east Linn County and surrounding communities.
“In 2020 I think people saw what could happen and it just – changed,” she said.
Fires Changed Landscape
On Aug. 16, 2020, two fires ignited by lightning strikes started on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation near Mt. Jefferson and, that same day the Beachie Creek Fire ignited near Opal Creek, west of the other two, blamed on a downed power line.
Due to steep, mountainous terrain, firefighters used indirect methods and water drops in an attempt to fight the fires, which grew in size, and on Sept. 7 of that year, powerful east winds began flowing, whipping the three into a single, massive wildfire, named the Santiam Canyon Fire. That conflagration ended up burning more than 400,000 acres in Linn, Marion, Jefferson and Clackamas counties, killing five people, destroying close to 1,600 structures and causing more than $25.2 million in damage.
Meanwhile, the Holiday Farm Fire ignited Sept. 7 from downed power lines along Hwy. 126 in the McKenzie Valley, rapidly growing to 173,393 acres and moving northward to threaten Sweet Home even more directly.
Swanson noted that the high-winds factor on Labor Day weekend of 2020 was extremely unusual for local firefighters, and she said lessons from the incident persist.
“Seasoned firefighters who had been in California, who had fought Santa Ana (winds) fires, were like, ‘What the heck? Can that happen here?’ Everyone was surprised.
Photo courtesy of Christian Whitfield
“In hindsight, sure, you could say, ‘Yeah, you sat on that too long,’ but to be fair about it, we didn’t know yet and now we know.”
Last summer’s Pyramid Fire, which broke out to the north of the Middle Santiam Wilderness in extremely rough, roadless terrain, was another indication that things needed to change, she said.
The fire started in an area in which closed forest roads were scheduled to reopen, she said, but that wasn’t due to occur until the spring of 2026.
“They tried to get in and they couldn’t before the fire exploded,” she said. “So that idea of it being so important to just be able to drive in and put the fire out – it’s not rocket science. In addition to fuels treatments on some roads, it might just simply be important to get there fast.”
The fire, reported on July 17, grew from three to 60 acres the next day and eventually burned more than 1,300 acres.
USFS Responds
Swanson said forestry officials started discussing what they could do around the edges of the wilderness to keep a fire from spreading in or out.
“We were talking to some folks from the Washington office about this, about how if we could have just driven there, we could have put out the Pyramid Fire, but we couldn’t.”
The outcome of those conversations was funding: initially about $500,000 from the Forest Service to address those problems. That amount later increased to $1.9 million, Whitfield said.
Swanson said local Forest Service officials were able to partner with the National Forest Foundation, a nonprofit that works with private forestland owners, particularly families, to contract for the thinning projects. The NFF met with local timber company owners and developed a list of areas that were deemed the most crucial for access to forestlands.
She said forest owners and Oregon Department of Forestry officials in Sweet Home helped identify the problem areas.
“They helped us with the choosing, identifying the original problem on the district, which was ‘What is the Forest Service going to do to try to have a different outcome?’”
Thinning in the Works
A roadside thinning project was put out to bid and Sweet Home Fire won the contract last July.
It has resulted in the establishment of SHFAD’s Wildland Fire Division, which is headed by Christian Whitfield and 22 staffers – six full-timers, three who work 10 months and 13 who are working four months during the summer.
SHFAD last fall purchased three 2023 four-wheel-drive Ford F-350 pickups and a $350,000 Bandit whole tree chipper that can grind up a 24-inch pine log for the division’s use.
Plus, Whitfield said, SHFAD refurbished an “old Suburban” for use with the project.
The chipper was funded through the seven-year bond approved by voters in May 2024, which also funded two wildland fire engines for the district.
The $1.9 million two-year fuels reduction contract enabled SHFAD to make the necessary hires.
SHFAD Wildfire Division
Whitfield said SHFAD’s summer wildland firefighters differ from those employed by Oregon Department of Forestry in Sweet Home in that ODF’s crews are engine-based, while SHFAD’s are hand crews.
That last detail was a big factor in SHFAD getting the contract, he said.
“The contract was all hand work – no machinery,” he said. “That’s the only reason we were able to compete on our bid.”
The contract requires clearing of roadside fuels 100 feet on each side of what will be a total of 40 miles of roads leading into the Middle Santiam Wilderness area. Debris is chipped or piled per specifications in the contract, he said.
Swanson said the Forest Service estimates the cost of the fuels mitigation at about $5,000 per mile.
Whitfield said SHFAD has completed “between a quarter and half of that” thus far. The hand crews do use the chipper, but the rest of the work is feet-on-the-ground.
“We’re on track to meet the contract,” he said.
Whitfield noted that the new staffers all took part in the five-day Mid-Willamette Valley Interagency Wildland Fire School held at Sweet Home High School last week.
The contract was a win-win in a lot of respects for the local agencies.
“The project allowed us to hire enough people to start our hand crew,” Whitfield said. We were already working through some ideas (to start a wildland fire division) and that allowed us to hire them to work on the project as well as provide coverage for the district.”
When a fire occurs in the district, he said, wildland personnel can respond to those – “then they go back to fuels mitigation.”
Also, he said, “We can send them out to fires around the state.”
Swanson cautioned that the fuels mitigation and road-clearing efforts are not a cure-all for stopping forest fires.
“There is no fire line in the world, no fire line in the Cascades that is wide enough for that,” she said, noting that in large fires the flames get into the forest canopy and can be whipped by winds, with sparks jumping as far as miles away.
“What it does do is it gives us opportunities,” she said. “If a fire is burning, it might give us an opportunity to back burn under the exact right conditions, and to deepen that distance and hold a fire in place, which would give us the opportunity to be quicker in our initial attack.
“Number one, you can drive there. Number two, you’ve already done the roadside work to get in there safely. The hazard trees have already been removed, right? So you’ve already sort of given yourself a head start.”
Moran said he appreciates the fuels mitigation efforts and he’s looking forward to seeing more roads re-opened.
“We’re working closely with the Forest Service,” he said. “This is something that we know is going to help.”
Partnership Important
Swanson said she personally appreciates that people and agencies are working together to come up with solutions.
Both CTC and Guistina Resources, the two largest private landowners in that area, had done “a lot of work” along the property boundary on the west side of the wilderness, she said.
“They built an incredible fire line along there.”.
Moran said CTC has been creating mechanical fuel breaks on roads on Hill Timber land adjacent to Forest Service lands. Those include clearing trees, using herbicides to battle unwanted brush and planting huckleberries in the open spaces “to help with food sources for people who like to pick huckleberries and for animals.”
He said that particular attention is paid to ridges and other locations where fire could spread rapidly.
“Fire knows no boundaries,” he said. “It doesn’t care whether it goes across Forest Service land or private property.”
Tyler said the May meeting involved multiple agencies that fight local fires, including public forestry agency officials, himself, Whitfield, Wildland Crew 21 Supt. Justin Wolfe and crew member Jake Hepler.
“This is a fun project with a different group of people,” Swanson said.
Forest Service officials met with the National Alliance of Forestland Owners, of which both CTC and Guistina are members, which weighed in on the needs in the region prior to issuing the contract.
Moran said he and other NAFO members showed USFS officials what they’d been doing in the region and what they planned.
NAFO membership gives members like CTC and Giustina legal authority to quickly respond to forest fires, even if they are on adjoining Forest Service lands.
“If we can get there quick, we can get it done,” Moran said. “We’re much more nimble than the Forest Service in getting equipment up there.”
That’s because CTC usually has logging contractors and road-building crews, along with its own employees, in the forests during fire season and “all those guys are trained, just like we are” and can respond quickly with equipment to a fire.
“They know the drill and if they can get there before it’s big, it’s well worth it,” he said.
Moran credited Swanson for being “real receptive” to the actual situation in the forest.
Swanson said that cooperation has been key to getting things moving.
“What I sometimes see in other places is landowners or the Forest Service or whoever – people get territorial. This isn’t the time to be territorial. This is the time to fight the fires together, right?
“It’s time for all of us to rally, for all of us to bring whatever we have, whether it’s knowledge or skills or equipment or operators or whatever it is, and bring it together and to see what we can do to get in front of it.
“We need to discuss together what’s the most important work and then do that work together.
“I think things we all learned in 2020 is you can never evacuate too early and we need to be better prepared, than to get surprised.”
Local Benefits
Tyler, who took over as fire chief in Sweet Home in 2022, said that although SHFAD is doing the work, he credited Forest Service officials for supporting the efforts to employ “out-of-the-box stuff we’re doing” to protect the area.
“We’re the only green canyon in the area right now, sandwiched between black on both sides.”
He said local residents have made it clear they are concerned about fire safety.
“Our community feels inadequately protected,” he said. “What we can do to help make the area safer, help ease some of the anxiety, is very important to me.
“Nobody wants fire on our landscape. We are all committed to getting on fires, keeping them as small as possible.”
Moran also said the public is not just about saving dollars but about public safety.
“This gives us a chance to stop it,” he said. “Once a big fire gets started, we know we don’t want it escaping, whether it’s burning more Forest Service ground or our property.
“It’s a public safety issue and an air quality issue.”