The Flat Fire, which is burning two miles northeast of Sisters in Central Oregon, has grown to more than 23,000 acres and is 13% contained, as of Friday morning. The fire broke out last week, grew rapidly and prompted Level 1, 2 and 3 evacuation orders in Deschutes and Jefferson counties. On Thursday, Level 3 orders were downgraded to Level 2 in both counties. According to an update posted Thursday morning, five homes have been destroyed by the fire, the cause of which is still under investigation.
Jim Cornelius, editor-in-chief of The Nugget Newspaper in Sisters, says that while the community is no stranger to wildfires, efforts have expanded in recent years to make it more fire-wise and resilient to wildfires. The city is considering updating its development code for new construction and in the spring, a local nonprofit, Citizens4Community, organized community forums to educate residents about fire insurance and wildfire preparedness, from assembling a go bag to requesting a free wildfire home assessment.
Cornelius joins us for an update about the Flat Fire, its impact on Sisters and how the catastrophic Labor Day Fires of 2020 shaped the community’s fire-readiness.
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. We’re going to spend the hour on wildfires today as we get ready to mark the 5th anniversary of Oregon’s devastating 2020 Labor Day Fires. But before we look back, we’re going to get an update on one of the largest fires that’s burning right now. The Flat Fire has burned more than 20,000 acres near Sisters. Jim Cornelius is the editor in chief of The Nugget Newspaper there, and he joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Jim Cornelius: Good afternoon. Thanks for having me.
Miller: What’s the latest you’ve heard on this fire?
Cornelius: Flat Fire is approximately two miles to the north and east of Sisters. Like you said, it’s a little over 23,000 acres right now and it’s listed at 13% contained. It seems that the crisis has passed. vacuation levels have been reduced. There’s nobody under level 3 (Go Now!) evacuation order at this time, but the work’s not over. They’re still doing structural protection, mopping up inside the control lines and we’re going to be dealing with this for a couple more weeks at least.
Miller: So no one under level 3 (Go Now!), but over the last week, a number of households had been?
Cornelius: A very large number of households. Yes, there were hundreds of households evacuated. It evolved very quickly. I had friends who went from a level one, which is to be ready to a level 3 (Go Now!) in the space of 20 minutes. Things evolved very quickly on Friday afternoon, and then there was a crisis point on Saturday, late afternoon, early evening. And so, yeah, a lot of people evacuated. Four houses lost, which is terrible for the folks that had their lives disrupted in that way, but everyone recognizes that it was almost miraculous that the losses weren’t considerably greater. The structural firefighters in the air attack really made some remarkable saves. The losses could have been a great deal higher than they were.
Miller: I understand there’s been a lot of appreciation for the work of firefighters in the region. Has that been more apparent this time than after or during other fires?
Cornelius: I would say that the outpouring of gratitude and appreciation this time around was greater just because the threat to lives and property was so immediate and the effort was genuinely heroic to save the houses that were saved. So there’s a recognition that this was an exceptional event and the outpouring has been quite intense.
Miller: How would you describe the mood in the community right now?
Cornelius: Tired. It was a long week. I know a lot of folks that were evacuated for a week. I know one of the people very well who lost his home. They’re tired. This was hard, but there is, very typically of Sisters, a real desire to help and to support the people that suffered losses and to do things that will have an impact in the long term. That’s a pretty common thing in this community and we’re seeing a lot of people getting together to talk about things that can be done in the long term to support the firefighting services here locally, support the people who have suffered losses to improve the resilience of the community to wildfire and other natural disasters.
Miller: I want to hear more about those sort of forward looking efforts, but just for a second to look back, am I right, first of all, that Sisters was hit much more by smoke than by fire itself five years ago in the Labor Day Fires?
Cornelius: Yeah. We weren’t impacted directly by fire, but the smoke was incredibly bad. At one point we had the worst air quality in the world because the smoke from Santiam Canyon and McKenzie Canyon were just emptying directly into Sisters, and you literally couldn’t see across the street. That was rough, but we also recognize that it wasn’t as rough for us as it was for the communities that were directly affected.
Miller: But even though Sisters did not burn five years ago, do you think that wildfire readiness and response is different in Sisters now than five years ago?
Cornelius: Yes. Yeah, the acute awareness really started after the Paradise Fire in California. There was a lot of talk in the community of, wow, could that happen here’? And then it did happen in communities that almost all of us have at least driven through and often many times, it really brings home the level of vulnerability.
Miller: So what has that meant in terms of actual policies or readiness? What changed?
Cornelius: Sisters has had a 25-year or so history of wildfires almost every year, but for the most part – and we’ve had evacuations and threats – but for the most part, the fires have been relatively slow to evolve. Some of them have been very big and very threatening, but didn’t immediately threaten communities in quite the same way. And what has changed is an awareness that this can happen very fast, and this fire showed that. Like I said, people jump from level 1 to level 3 evacuations – get out right now – in very short time frames, and that’s not the way we’ve experienced fire for the most part. I think that the recognition of what can happen to a community and that a community could be completely destroyed just wasn’t part of our sense of what fire was like until the Paradise Fire and then the Holiday Farm Fire and and the Labor Day fire, all of the Labor Day fires. It changed the level of awareness, the level of perceived risk and people’s willingness to do the things that are necessary to at least give firefighters a fighting chance to save their homes
Miller: Like home hardening or getting more amenable, say, to prescribed burns?
Cornelius: Defensible space, I think, is the first thing that people really started to pay attention to. Accessibility for firefighting apparatus, that’s been a battle in some areas in Sisters for people to be aware that if a fire engine can’t get into their driveway because of overhanging branches or it’s too tight, that their home’s not going to get saved. That awareness and people being willing to take action on that sort of thing, paying attention to where their firewood pile is, some home hardening. That definitely gained momentum after the Paradise Fire and the Labor Day Fires.
It’s got significant momentum now because people are concerned that they’re going to lose their ability to get insurance because of changes in the way insurance companies are viewing wildfire risk. That’s really heightened the interest in the past year. And so the community is very, very aware of what they need to be doing. The city of Sisters is just about done with some development code revisions that will require wildfire hardening in new construction. They’re not asking people to retrofit and it excludes commercial, but it’s something and not insignificant. So there’s a high level of awareness and a high willingness to actually take action and not just say, yeah, I should do that one of these days.
Miller: Jim, thanks very much and best of luck to you.
Cornelius: Thank you.
Miller: That’s Jim Cornelius. He is the editor in chief of the Nugget Newspaper in Sisters.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
