Beachie Creek: The Smoke From A Not-So-Distant Fire

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This fire will go down in the same historic terms as the Eagle Creek Fire of 2017.

Marion County looks like a big pork chop. It's wide on the west and narrows to a sort of a rough panhandle on the east, where it delves into the mountains. And, just as everywhere right now, its tinder-dry.

Now, history will also indicate that northwestern Oregon had a remarkably potent wind event over the last 12+ hours (it's 1:54 PM on the 8th as I write this). A great deal of collateral damage has already occurred; multiple power outages, over 100,000 still out of power in the Portland Metro area in PGE's service area alone (we, fortunately are not one of those. The massive demand indicates waits for reconnection of service of possibly 1-2 days hence in some cases). Also, PGE decided to take a page out of the California playbook and pre-emptively cut power to the area along US 26 going up to Mount Hood, to prevent a possibly downed and shorting out power line from causing a wildfire up Rhododendron or Zigzag way. 

And that has largely worked. In Portland the worst of it continues to be the power outages, and last night there was considerable wildfire smoke from numerous conflagrations east of the Cascades not only in Oregon but also Washington. At the time of this writing the skies over Portland are back to that dreary clear blue we see so much of at the height of summer.

The issues in Oregon include two fires on the panhandle end of the Marion County pork chop, called Beachie Creek and Lionshead. Beachie Creek is in the Opal Creek Wilderness north of Detroit, and the Lionshead fire is somewhat to the east of that nearer Mount Jefferson. Before this weekend the Beachie Creek fire was a small fire but then the wind came though and it does what wind does to fires, and in this particular case, it's expanded it to historic proportion.

This morning, while on Silverton Road about two miles west of the eponymous town, our correspondent Gus Frederick showed the smoke from that not-all-that distant fire moving in:

The viewpoint in this photo is cardinal east. the smoke plume seems to indicate a source off to the east-southeast, which matches up with the general bearing of where that fire is. 

Checking with the Oregon Dept of Forestry, who embeds the Active Major Fires map from the National Interagency Fire Center, yields this salient information:

The map takes fire information from satellite overflights and compiles them. This big red and yellow patch is the area around the Beachie Creek fire where fire sign has been detected by satellite. The small detached area just  to the left of that region's left edge obscures the town of Lyons. Moving east along the lower edge of that patch are the towns of Mehama, Mill City, Gates. The small blue patch below the Hwy 22 shield is Detroit. The light green area around the highway shield form Hwy 214 is  Silver Falls state park. The edge of this zone is less than 10 miles east of Stayton and about 15 miles southeast of Silverton

And that's why the Santiam Canyon was evacuated earlier today and why the towns along the Cascade Highway are on Level 2 evac alerts.

That's the state of play of things right now.