An electrical problem with a travel trailer sparked a fire in Sisters, Oregon, on Saturday and the wind-fanned wildfire destroyed two Cloverdale-area homes and six outbuildings and closed U.S. Highway 20 for hours, Fire Chief Thad Olsen said.
Crews from numerous agencies remained on site Sunday to help mop up the 74-acre Cloverdale Fire, which broke out around 4 p.m. Saturday and quickly grew to four acres even before the first firefighters arrived on scene.
“We were fortunate that it did not jump Highway 20,” Olsen told NewsChannel 21 on Sunday. “We had a lot of winds coming out of the northwest at the time, with gusts of 20 miles an hour,” he said. “And to get ahead of a fire like that is very dangerous for firefighters. With continued fuels, narrow driveways, so there is no escape path for firefighters.
“And what basically turned the tide for us was we put in a call for retardant air tankers,” Olsen said.
A few hours before the Cloverdale fire was spotted, a La Pine fire destroyed a vacant home and led to a one-acre brush fire. It also prompted the closure of Burgess Road, west of Highway 97, for several hours.
Firefighters also responded to a fire nine miles east of Clarno and the John Day River. The Porcupine II fire is about 25% contained, at a little more than 500 acres; investigators believe it was human caused.
These alerts are informative (and scary) and give us pause to think about how we might prevent or limit fire in such a case. I’m wondering if it is possible for your experts to provide some follow-up information and advice to RVers after posting one of these articles. It would be extremely useful to us to know what we could do to prevent, minimize, or put out a fire that our RV (or we) caused. I always make notes in my “Full-Time RVing” file when I read something that gives me a hint of a safety precaution I can take, but in a case like this one, I have no idea what started the fire and if it was preventable or could have been minimized.
Thanks! The advice I get from this newsletter is always valuable. Chuck and staff have given me a “college education” in RVing, and I’m grateful.
100 plus active fires out here in the Westen States, some by nature, most by man. Either way, one should have a plan to skedaddle if possible.