The Northwest: Million-Acre Bomb

While record rainfalls in the North east have made summer a washout, the Northwestern states have experienced some of the hottest, driest weather in memory. In eastern Washington, the humidity last week dropped to 6%. Portland staggered through its 63rd consecutive day without rain—an alltime record—and the twelfth with temperatures over 100°. But personal discomfort was the least worry. Brittle and tinder-dry in the drought, more than 110,000 acres of the Northwest’s timberlands were ablaze, or already burned out.

About 75% of the forest fires, worst in a decade, were started by summer lightning storms rumbling over millions of acres of timber, from Montana’s Glacier National Park to Oregon’s Mount Hood and as far north as forest lands in British Columbia northeast of Vancouver. The rest were touched off by man—campers’ careless cigarettes or a lumberman’s fast-moving cable sparking off a log.

In Oregon alone, more than 5,000 fire fighters were mustered to hack out fire lines to contain the blazes. More than one thousand Navajo Indians, the famed “hotshots” specially trained in forest-fire control, were flown in from Albuquerque. Smoke jumpers parachuted into the rugged, inaccessible mountain country of Washington, Montana, Idaho and Oregon, while World War II B-17s and B-26s swept daily over the crackling forests dropping fire-retarding chemical bombs.

Hot, dry eastern winds up to 30 m.p.h. fanned the flames across bulldozed firebreaks. Idaho’s worst blaze, out of control on Trapper Peak for two weeks, was almost impossible to fight. Foresters had to hack fire lines in steep, rocky terrain, and often their work went for nothing as burning logs rolled downhill across the lines to set off new acres of timber. The fires forced the closing of nine national forests. For all their damage to timberland, not to mention the region’s ubiquitous wildlife, the flames by week’s end had taken no human lives. But the eerie summer storms continued, bringing lightning without rain (it evaporated in the heat before reaching the ground). Until the weather changed, the Northwest remained a volatile, million-acre bomb.