Firefighters scrambled Friday to control a raging inferno in southeastern Oregon that’s spreading about 24,000 acres a day in windy conditions, one of numerous wildfires across the West that are straining resources.
The smoke and heat from the massive wildfire has been generating pyrocumulonimbus clouds – dubbed “fire clouds” – that can reach up to 6 miles (10 kilometers) in the sky and are visible from more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) away.
According to Oregon Live, a gigantic fire cloud over the Bootleg fire collapsed Thursday night, forcing the withdrawal of firefighters for their own safety, said Ryan Berlin, a spokesman working with the Oregon Department of Forestry.
Meteorologists this week have spotted bigger and more extreme forms of these fire clouds that create their own unstable weather system. When that smoke column collapses, Berlin said, it produces powerful downdrafts that can spew embers across unburnt parts of the landscape.
This extreme fire behavior, including the formation of more fire clouds, was expected to persist Friday and worsen into the weekend. “It’s definitely a ‘watch out’ situation,” Berlin said. “We pulled people off the line while it did its thing.”
Bootleg Fire continues to grow at a rapid rate
The Bootleg Fire, which started on July 6, northeast of Klamath Falls, has incinerated 241,497 acres as of Friday morning. Containment remains at 7.0 percent. The Bootleg Fire dwarfs a handful of other fires burning collectively on more than 26,000 acres around Oregon.
CNN meteorologist Brandon Miller says the massive blaze has spread around 24,000 acres per day on average, or just over 1,000 acres every single hour. At least 20 homes had already been destroyed along with 54 other outbuildings and put another 2,000 at risk
Communities around Summer Lake and the town of Paisley were being evacuated, officials reported on the Bootleg Fire Facebook Page. Because of “extreme wildfire behavior.”
“The Bootleg Fire perimeter is more than 200 miles long. That’s an enormous amount of line to build and hold.” said Rob Allen, incident commander for the Pacific Northwest Area Incident Management Team 2, in an online update.
