Saturday, July 21st, the Medford Air Tanker base hit one million gallons of retardant used. What makes this number so astounding?
This is normally a number seen at the end of the fire season, not the start, demonstrating the extraordinary effort underway to stop the fires in Southern Oregon.
Taylor Creek Fire #UPDATE7/19/18 – 8:45 a.m.The current size of the #TaylorCreekFire is 160 acres. Additional resources of 10 and 20 person crews will be added to the fire today. Additional aircraft will also be working the fire.Crews will be taking a direct and aggressive attack on the fire. They will be working to open a ridge line as a fire break today.The Oregon Department of Forestry and the U.S. Forest Service- Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest are in unified command of the Taylor Creek Fire.A level 2, "Be Set", evacuation notice issued by the Josephine County Sheriff's Office remains in place as a precaution.The Taylor Creek Fire is part of the Wagner Complex. An additional update will be coming out later for the #WagnerComplex in Jackson County.
Posted by ODF Southwest Oregon District on Thursday, July 19, 2018
Of that million gallons, 219,000 gallons have gone towards suppression efforts on fires on the RRSNF, and the rest has gone towards assisting our partners and neighbors in their own suppression efforts!
Oregon State Representative, David Brock Smith, reported a few months ago that there was success in getting the Oregon Department of Forestry to sign a “call when needed” agreement for the Supertanker.
It’s first work in Oregon was actually on California’s Klamathon Fire a few weeks ago, where it worked at the border. The Oregon Department of Forestry called it into service on the Garner Complex Fire to assist in boxing in the fire and protecting private lands.
The SuperTanker falls into the VLAT or Very Large Airtanker category, along with the DC-10 aircraft. The Boeing 747 jumbo jet has been converted for aerial firefighting, is capable of carrying more than 19,000 gallons of liquid and can release a line of water or fire retardant three miles long.
There are 108 active wildfires in the U.S. burning nearly 1,200,000 acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center with the Pacific Northwest regions seeing the majority of the nation’s wildfire activity.
About 15,500 wildland firefighters and support personnel are deployed to those wildfires, according to the latest National Interagency Fire Center tally. Almost 7,000 personnel are fighting wildfires in the Pacific Northwest.
There are 16 large fires, 14 in Oregon and two in Washington, currently burning just over 100,000 acres in the Pacific Northwest, according to the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center.
In southwest Oregon several timber fires started by lightning have turned into large complexes consisting of multiple smaller blazes. The Garner Complex, northeast of Grants Pass, is about 11,500 acres and 15 percent contained, while the South Umpqua Complex is about 5,000 acres and 10 percent contained.
The above video shows a fleet of aircraft scooping water for successive drops on the Owyhee Fire burning in northwest Nevada, near the state’s borders with Idaho and Oregon. That wildfire is 5,300 acres in size and 50 percent contained.
The U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) issued heat advisories from the southern Willamette Valley in Oregon all the way north to Seattle.
A large section of southwest Oregon also has a heat advisory, in addition to an air quality alert. And there is a red flag warning in effect today for eastern Oregon.
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