BAKER CITY — Fire officials during a public meeting Monday evening, July 29, in Baker City gave an overview of progress on wildfires in Baker County.

Members of the Southern Area Gold Complex Incident Management Team and an incident commander from the Badland Complex spoke on the wildfires at Churchill School to residents curious about the situation in their county.

Durkee Fire

Mike Broad, operations section chief trainee of the SAG team, said crews have been making great progress, in the last few days in particular. Majority of the southern end of the fire is contained at this time.

The main emphasis has been on the north end of the fire. It’s being held within the perimeter of the fire line construction in that area.

“We’ve done some strategic firing in that area to be sure that the fire does not have any room to grow,” Broad said. “We’ve got several crews there working engines, using aircrafts and drones.”

Among the northeastern side of the fire, along Interstate Highway 84, there has been heat that’s visible from the highway.

“We’ve had resources there containing hot spots and patrolling for additional heat,” Broad said.

On the eastern side of the fire, from Bridgeport to the south, half of the area is contained. Crews are patrolling the area but not finding much heat.

“Overall the fire area is looking really good,” Broad said.

Badland Complex Fires

Jay Miller, incident commander for the Badland Complex wildfires, said the Rocky Mountain Area team is now dealing with three wildfires, down from 11 when they were deployed.

The fires were either taken care of or assimilated into the bigger ones that were there.

The three wildfires are the Coyote Fire, Thompson Fire and Powder Fire, with most of the work and resources on the Thompson Fire.

“We got a lot of resources in there from skidgines, crews and engines,” Miller said.

The Powder Fire has reached 100% containment at 728 acres burned, the Coyote Fire has reached 75% containment at more than 22,000 acres burned and the Thompson Fire has reached 31% containment at more than 31,000 acres burned.

Temperatures

Maddie Cristelle, incident meteorologist working for the National Weather Service out of Seattle, said Oregon might experience another heatwave, with temperatures reaching more than 100 on Aug. 1 and 2.

The cities with the highest probability of a heatwave, she said, are Vale, Payette, Ontario and Huntington, with confidence levels reaching 90% or above on Friday. In Baker City, the confidence level is at 10% on Thursday and 50% on Friday.

“The only wrinkle in this situation is that there’s a lot of other fires in the area that are putting off a significant amount of smoke,” Cristelle said. “That does tend to put a lid on how hot the temperatures can be.”

On average, temperatures were 2-5 degrees cooler.

Furthermore, the eastern edge of Oregon had precipitation slightly above average.

Baker City on July 30-31 has a 35%-50% chance of 24 hour precipitation greater than one-one hundredth of an inch starting at 5 p.m.

Next Steps

Jordan Davis, agency administrator with the Bureau of Land Management, said the federal agency is working on ordering a burn area rehab team to help draft an emergency stabilization rehab plan.

“(The wildfires) have affected our livestock operators, forestry products (and) wildlife on the ground,” Davis said. “These industries rely on public lands to work. We recognize the concern.”

The rehab plan will help the agency put effort on the ground where they would be most impactful.

Sean McKinney, agency administrator for the U.S. Forest Service, said it is looking at replanting, forestry applications, restoration applications and stabilization.

“The only way we get through this is together,” McKinney said.

You can view a recording of the meeting on the Cow Valley and Durkee Fires Information 2024 Facebook page.