Last week, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek declared a state of emergency due to “the imminent and ongoing threat of wildfire.” The emergency declaration will last until the end of the year. It directs the Office of Emergency Management to coordinate personnel, equipment and resources in collaboration with the State Fire Marshal and Oregon Department of Forestry to respond to the wildfires that have burned more than 100,000 acres in the state so far. The Oregon National Guard will also be mobilized as needed to assist with fighting wildland fires for the remainder of the fire season.
Related: Wildfires and air quality information hub
The National Interagency Fire Center lists six large, active wildfires burning in Oregon. That includes the Cram Fire, which broke out on July 13 and has burned more than 95,000 acres northeast of Madras and triggered evacuation orders in Jefferson and Wasco counties. It is now the largest wildfire burning in the contiguous U.S., with more than 900 personnel responding to it.
Joining us for an update on the wildfire season are Oregon State Fire Marshal Mariana Ruiz Temple and Kyle Williams, deputy director of fire operations at Oregon Department of Forestry.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Once again, the largest wildfire in the country is burning in Oregon. The Cram Fire, about 15 miles north of Madras, has burned close to 100,000 acres. It’s one of the reasons that Oregon Governor Tina Kotek declared a state of emergency last week. The declaration will last until the end of this year. It directs the Office of Emergency Management to coordinate the personnel, equipment and resources, in collaboration with the State Fire Marshal and the Oregon Department of Forestry.
For more on the current fire situation and the outlook for the rest of the season, I’m joined now by the Oregon State Fire Marshal Mariana Ruiz-Temple and Kyle Williams, the deputy director of fire operations at the Oregon Department of Forestry. It’s good to have both of you on the show.
Kyle Williams: Thanks, Dave. Happy to be here.
Mariana Ruiz-Temple: Thank you.
Miller: So, Kyle Williams, first – I do want to start with the Cram Fire. Can you give us the latest?
Williams: Yeah, you bet. As of today, there is control line all the way around the perimeter of the Cram Fire. Crews are heavy into what we call mopping up and cold trailing the edges. There’s still a little bit of heat in the southeast corner. But crews are gaining confidence by the minute that we’re gonna be able to get that wrapped up and off the landscape here in the next few days.
Miller: Those teams have had a couple cooler, wetter days after the opposite for a while. What difference did that make in terms of containment?
Williams: Well, it certainly helped. There was also just an absolutely phenomenal coordinated response between multiple agencies. So a real quick ground laying there. There were jurisdictional acres protected by the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, the Rangeland Fire Protection Associations and the Oregon Department of Forestry, with the structure protection provided by the Oregon State Fire Marshal’s Office.
All of those entities worked together in that full scale response to be able to put the line around that fire. And we got line around it, then the cooler weather showed up and we were able to start winding things down there fairly quickly. So it is a great example of the complete and coordinated system we have in Oregon, then a little bit of luck on the weather side.
Miller: Mariana, can you explain the different roles that your two agencies, at the state level, yours being the Oregon State Fire Marshal’s office and Kyle’s at the Oregon Department of Forestry … the two different lanes you have essentially, in terms of wildfire response?
Ruiz-Temple: Sure. The Department of the State Fire Marshal has responsibility for mobilizing the Oregon Fire Mutual Aid systems and oversight of that system. So that [includes] our 305 structural fire agencies and 11,000 firefighters. The Department of Forestry and the Department of the State Fire Marshal really are your state of Oregon’s wildfire response agencies. We come together, as Kyle indicated, one team, one plan, one mission, to protect Oregon natural resources and communities.
So on a lot of these fires that are encroaching or close in and around communities, you’ll a lot of times see the Department of the State Fire Marshal there with their response partners, as Kyle indicated. So we really are that state force that brings those structural resources around the built environment. And as we know, in Oregon many of our wildfires are impacting communities more and more.
Miller: How much have local fire districts – say, at the city level or rural fire districts that are focused on preventing structures from burning – evolved in recent years as wildfires have gotten more frequent and more destructive?
Ruiz-Temple: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ve been with the Department of the State Fire Marshal for 30 years this year, so this is my 30th fire season. And we’ve not only seen an evolution of wildfire in terms of complexity, the length, duration and types. As that has progressed, so has our Oregon Fire Mutual Aid System (OFMAS). Our mutual aid system is one of the most robust, certainly in the West, but I would say across the nation, in our ability to mobilize these resources, have oversight of them and put them in the right places. That really comes out of the Oregon Conflagration Act and the agency’s ability to mobilize them around the state. This fire season alone has been one of our most active fire seasons to date, with over six conflagrations and six immediate response and prepositioning assignments, to date.
Miller: Kyle Williams, I noted that today is a switchover for the Cram Fire, from one fire team that’s been handling the fire for a while now to a new one that’s coming in. How does that process work?
Williams: That’s a great question. So there is a transition today as the complexity of the Cram Fire has been winding down. There were a couple other fires that were in the nearby area that needed an incident management team. So we’re adding the Cram Fire as a branch to those other fires, with that new team. Then the team that’s transitioning out is gonna go to a fire up in Washington. That all sounds a little bit confusing.
But essentially, the team that’s in place usually stair step up in complexity. So you’ll have a smaller Type 3 organization and then a larger, complex incident management team will come in. They spend a day shadowing the work done by the team before them, identifying what the operational plans are, where camp is, where the resources are, what resources are needed . They sync all that up so that the machine doesn’t stop moving ...
[Williams’ sound is temporarily lost]
Ruiz-Temple: I’ll just close out what [Kyle] is stating. We have a whole system that our agency is part of, supports and works every day on. And that’s how do we triage fires, how do we prioritize fires and how do we get the right resources to those fires. That is a system that happens every day. That’s what’s happening on the Cram Fire. The Department of the State Fire Marshal was in unified command with our green incident management team and they are demobilizing today with 14 task forces. So it’s a really good sign of where that fire is currently today.
Miller: Both of you have emphasized that what has really made a difference in recent years and what’s gotten better is coordination from all these different partners, local jurisdictions, state level agencies and offices – the alphabet soup of federal jurisdictions and public lands. It does make me wonder then, what’s different about what follows from the governor’s declaration last week. If that’s about sharing resources and coordinating personnel and equipment, what can you do, as a result of that emergency declaration, that you couldn’t do, say, two weeks ago?
Ruiz-Temple: Yeah, great question. The Department of Forestry, Department of the State Fire Marshal did request this. This executive order typically happens every summer. For our agency, it allows us to implement the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, or EMAC. That requires a state declaration for our Agency to go out to other states and request structural resources. So when we get around the tipping point that we were at, frankly this week, the ability to go and get resources from Idaho, California or Utah, this declaration opens the door, if you will, for me to make that operational decision. It also allows our department to lean into the state agency system, under that Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan [CEMP], to get other assets that are needed in this wildfire fight.
Kyle are you still available [to] go over that for ODF?
Williams: Yeah. I’m back, sorry about that. On the Department of Forestry side, the key resources that allows us to access are with the National Guard. Those are things you would think about right off the top, like firefighting, helicopters, and we utilize soldiers as ground crew resources. But then things like medevac capabilities, through the National Guard, are really critical when we’ve got a lot of firefighters deployed to really difficult spaces out across the state. They can come and help us with access to those. And then it allows us, through the Office of Emergency Management, to access resources from other state agencies.
A good example last summer was when we were dealing with the fires that had spread across the state. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife was able to lend us their tanker trucks to be able to pack water. Multiple other agencies lent folks to help on other administrative aspects of the firefight. So it really broadens the spectrum of folks that we can tap into. And it helps us when resources are constrained.
Miller: At the peak of the season last year in Oregon, there were something like 12,000 people fighting wildfires in Oregon alone. Kyle Williams, do you know if you’re going to be able to get that many this year if circumstances once again require it?
Williams: Well, it depends on the timing of that need. At the moment, there are about 18,000 firefighters deployed nationally. And that’s reflective of a wildfire season that has a much broader geographical scope across the country than we had last summer. As strange as this sounds, we were somewhat lucky last July that Oregon was the epicenter of the fires across the nation. So we were able to bring in just about anyone we needed, because they weren’t busy in other places.
That’s not the case currently because those other states are still busy. As we look out into August though, some of the southeast states, northeast, southwest are starting to wind down a little bit. And we do anticipate more folks becoming available into the system, if we can get past these next couple of weeks.
Miller: The U.S. Forest Service has lost close to 5,000 employees because of buyouts and layoffs. Where have you seen the effects of that reduction in the federal workforce?
Williams: Chief, I’ll start and then maybe you can fill in a little bit. I think, on the surface, nationally, there are Complex Incident Management Teams [CIMTs] that are made up of those federal agency folks. Last summer, we had somewhere in the mid-40s, in terms of numbers of teams that were rostered and available. This summer, we’re tracking about 38, so a drop off of between six or seven of those national incident management teams [who are] fully rostered at any time. Below that, it still remains to be seen, Dave, about what the capacity is going to be to fill in some of those other positions. But at least at the high level, what we’re tracking is a few less of those national teams.
Miller: Mariana, what about managers? Because it’s one thing to say that there are “X” fewer teams, in this case like six or seven. What about mid-level managers who, I understand, are crucial for coordination?
Ruiz-Temple: Yeah, that’s a great question. I would agree with my colleague Kyle, on the piece about what we’re experiencing nationally, on the decline of CIMTs. I would say that this is not a new thing this year. We have seen, over the last decade, a decline in the incident management teams available. And we have dealt with the persistent problem of middle management, and that’s across the entire spectrum and across the last 10 years.
So I think we have always had a concern about the level of mid-management that is needed on the ground to help us implement those resources. I think, as Kyle indicated, when we get into August, [we’ll] really see what the impacts are this year, but certainly as this persistent issue has remained, how that will impact August. August is the month when we have a lot of concern and I do believe we’ll be in a competition of resources across the West, because we’re all aligning to have that potential for significant wildfire, in all of our states currently.
Miller: Some number of wildfires happen because of lightning. But my understanding is that the vast majority happen because of various human causes. I’d love to get both of your thoughts briefly, before we say goodbye, about what you want Oregonians to be thinking about right now as we enter the height of fire season?
Ruiz-Temple: You’re right, about 75% to 80% of wildfires are sparked by human activity. The number one thing I would like to ask all Oregonians and visitors is do your part. Please know your regulations. Please take a second thought if you’re going to be using mechanized equipment during the afternoon hours. Please understand that if you’re in a certain district, whether you shouldn’t be doing debris burning. When you pull over, be cognizant of how something might spark a wildfire. I think that’s the number one thing that we can ask, is help do your part to help the fire service, certainly as we get into the August months.
Williams: I absolutely echo the Chief’s comments there. We only have so many firefighters. We only have so many firefighting resources. We can gear up and be prepared for a lightning event. And when we know we can go all out after those for a few days, we generally have success. But what we’ve seen over and over again, and especially this summer, we’ll be heavily engaged in fighting those lightning fires and then someone’s carelessness starts a new fire that we don’t have a resource available to go get. We had that last summer, like I mentioned, already this summer.
What I would ask is for everyone to be mindful of their actions. It is the things you don’t anticipate happening that are causing these fires. A tow chain dragging, an electric fence making contact with dry grass, you name it. So we need every Oregonian to be diligent when they’re outside and especially recreating, so that we can help our firefighters be successful. They are great at what they do, but there are only so many of them.
Miller: Mariana Ruiz-Temple and Kyle Williams, thanks very much.
Ruiz-Temple: Thank you.
Williams: Thank you.
Miller: Kyle Williams is deputy director of fire operations at the Oregon Department of Forestry. Mariana Ruiz-Temple is Oregon’s State Fire Marshal.
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