EDITORIAL: Grateful for fast fire response

Published 12:45 pm Wednesday, September 14, 2022

Sometimes, with some wildfires, there is no substitute for aircraft.

Such was the case with the Jordan Creek fire.

It started late in the morning on Saturday, Sept. 10, just north of Interstate 84 near the Lookout Mountain exit, about 33 miles southeast of Baker City.

Not surprisingly, after nearly two months of mostly hot, mostly dry weather, the flames quickly climbed the steep slopes east of Jordan Creek — slopes too steep, in many places, for bulldozers, which are vital for building control lines, to safely operate.

(The cause of the fire remains under investigation.)

Baker County Sheriff Travis Ash said he was concerned that the flames would spread to the Lookout Mountain Road and potentially move from the grass and sagebrush at lower elevations to the forests at higher elevations. Because the Lookout Mountain area is popular with hunters — archery season is underway — sheriff’s deputies notified campers about the potential danger from the fire.

Not long after the flames were reported, airplanes loaded with fire retardant began to arrive. Eventually, two multi-engine tankers and four single-engine tankers were assigned to the fire.

Ian Morcom, a Bureau of Land Management employee who was incident commander for the fire, said the fast response from the aircraft, along with work on the ground by firefighters from multiple agencies, corralled the blaze within a few hours.

The aircraft painted the tinder-dry grass and brush with swathes of red retardant that blocked the flames’ advance.

The combination of weather, fuel conditions and terrain was a combustible one. A week or so earlier, in a similar situation, a fire in northern Malheur County spread over more than 3,000 acres in just a couple hours. The Jordan Creek fire had similar potential.

But in the end the fire covered just 98 acres.

No structures were burned, and no one was hurt.

The Jordan Creek fire illustrates how vital it is to have retardant planes nearby and available. That six aircraft arrived so quickly, even with several major fires burning in this corner of Oregon and elsewhere around the state and the West, is a testament to the firefighting capacity at the federal, state and local levels.

This is an expensive armada, to be sure.

But it’s gratifying to see this annual costly campaign yield benefits. It’s impossible, of course, to say how damaging the Jordan Creek fire might have been had the response been a bit less hasty.

Fortunately that’s a moot point.

— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor