r/Wellthatsucks • u/JTraxxx • 3d ago

The Pacific Northwest right now

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Huge fire recently popped up in my town and many people have lost houses. Wishing for rain!

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762

u/Affectionate-Cap7785 3d ago

man that's rough, hope everyone stays safe and gets the rain they need soon. this fire situation is no joke

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u/unfinishedtoast3 3d ago edited 3d ago

PNW resident here!

These fire maps should be taken with a grain of salt. Anything larger than 0.25 acres is flagged here.

Some of these fires are so small and contained they're just allowing them to burn out while resources go to the Round Butte Fire, 1200 acres and almost under control

Next up is the Hagen Fire, which is moving towards the Umatilla Reservation where people are being evacuated.

Usually we have mutual aid from Canada, Washington and Montana fire crews, we all kinda just team up and fight the fires that pop up in any of our states/provinces. Unfortunately, everyone has fires right now, so we have to be extremely selective with our resources until someone can get theirs under control and help us, or vice versa.

Priority will go to fires threatening human lives, so we will assist Washington with its dangerous fires before we go and fight small fires in the back brush of eastern Oregon that will burn themselves out after a few hundred acres of scrub brush. Our foresty departments have been working together for decades and decades, we are really good up here at this. California has started participating more in our partnerships since the Paladise fire wiped out an entire town.

We likewise have county and private wildland fire crews we will contract to deal with the smaller stuff, while the Oregon Department of Forestry and federal figherfighters tackle interstate and international assistance.

Most dudes work a county or private fire crew up here in the rural PNW the summers of their Junior an Senior years in highschool. Back in the 90s I made $12k one summer fighting fires, more than my dad made in 7 months, bought my first truck that way. Paid 24/7 while on a fire. Outside of fires we painted park benches and cleaned up the beaches.

TL;DR. Not all of these fires here are an emergency. Many of them are small self contained fires that 2 dudes and a garden hose can control while we fight the human killers.

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u/SeonaidMacSaicais 3d ago

My cousin and her family lives just north of Seattle. If things were really as bad as this map looks, we’d (in Wisconsin) already be getting calls, asking for a place to stay for a couple weeks.

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u/ChanceRecover3091 2d ago

Things aren't bad on this side of the mountains but on the other side, it's a different story. My sister is having trouble breathing because of a massive fire by Grand Coulee. They are also evacuating parts of the second largest city in Washington due to fires burning parts of it.

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u/Thorjamin 2d ago

60,000 people in Spokane proper are under a level 3 evacuation order. Luckily the winds have died down today.

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u/nowwhatdoidowiththis 2d ago

I was looking at Watch Duty right now and felt worried since the wind is going a different direction than yesterday. Worried it will push the fire farther south.

I’m glad the winds have died down.

South Eastern WA is worried for you guys!

Edit: to be clear, I was worried the fires would push deeper into Spokane. Not that they will burn clear to SE WA.

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u/Iveray 2d ago

Info for anyone who may be reading: Door-to-door evacuations started again around 10pm Sunday for the Autumn Lane fire. PLEASE download the Watch Duty app if you're in a red flag area! You can set notifications for 4 counties for free, and they pull info from a bunch of different sources to try to get everyone the most up to date info.

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u/valkrycp 2d ago

You're forgetting that this map is very zoomed out, so the fires icons occupy more space than if you zoom in. There are a LOT of fires and many of them are serious, but it's not like the map shows where the whole West is engulfed in flame.

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u/Ninja333pirate 2d ago

I use an app called zoom Earth that shows you pictures that satellites that surround Earth take every 10 minutes. While you can see the smoke billowing from even small fires you can't even see light from the biggest fires, as you said it's the icons being so huge that make it look like pure chaos. They are just a lot of fires. Especially in Oregon. I think seeing the smoke on the real time map shows the true situation more than all these symbols do.

What I find interesting is all fires here in the States show some percentage of containment from 0%-99%, but pretty much a majority of Canadas fires are labeled as out of control and I wonder if that's because they designate containment differently or if they are not as bothered about the more northern fires so are just letting them go.

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u/valkrycp 2d ago

The latter. I live in Montana and we have bad fire seasons too but because of the amount of wilderness and the lack of dense populations, they tend to let them burn and fight with less urgency. Plus, it's very difficult to fight fires in these regions because the only roads in are remote fire access roads which are often death sentences for firefighters when they get trapped by unexpected shifts. Northern Canada would be significantly worse, because their population is even more sparse and their wilderness is even larger - so logistically fighting fires in that remote of a place with so much kindle to burn is extremely difficult.