This summer I worked o the OHV trails crew on the North Fork
of the John day Ranger district in the Umatilla National Forest. Working on a
shared base with the fire crews meant that if the fires started burning
regularly they could take people from other departments like mine and we would
fight fire along with them as part of their crew. The fuel in the area is large
ponderosa pine stands with mixed Douglas fir for the over story and grassy pine
needle understory. We got called in all the way from an assignment we were on
in Walla Walla to come back to what they were calling the turner basin fire
that ended up being on of our biggest on district fires on district. The fire
was in a heavily wooded area and the relative humidity had been low along with
long periods of high temperatures they were worried about this fire taking off
and becoming a major complex. So they called in all the aircraft that was
available and just blasted it with retardant and water for a couple days until
we were sure it wasn’t going to travel far. If they hadn’t been so proactive with
those conditions things could have gotten a lot worse before they got better.
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Figure 1. This is a picture I took this summer of a
helicopter carrying a water bucket.
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