Same Street, Two Different Wildfire Days

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Today in wildfire news, we've learnt that conditions for the endangered towns along the Cascade Piedmont have improved greatly. Some of the Level 3 evacuations have been reduced to Level 2; Level 2 to Level 1, and Level 1 to Level None. This is due in no small part to shifting weather; there's been cooling and the winds, which fanned the originally-small fires into the mega-infernos they became, have largely abated. 

What this means for towns like Oregon City down the Cascade Highway corridor through Silverton, Mt. Angel, and Sublimity-Stayton is that evacuation is no longer imminent at any moment and, since we expect rain starting tonight and into tomorrow, a comcomitant reduction in wildfire smoke pollution. It's still historically bad at this point, but the AQI, which was in the 500s and thus officially off-the-chart (the AQI's Hazardous designation runs from 400-500, above that, it's undefined) recently dipped to around 330.

In terms of peanut butter, the air quality has gone from chunk-style to creamy.

So far, from my personal point of view, the worst of it was yesterday, the 13th. I thought the 12th was pretty heinous, but the 13th kind of rewrote the book on that. What follows is a side-by-side of SE Market Street at about 113th Avenue looking east toward 117th, the same spot in both photos (give or take fifty feet), where things went from bad to holy freaking moly ...

 

On the 12th, AQI counts were in the 300s-400s. On the 13th, they were over 500. Any more stuff in the air after that and we drivers would have had to carry shovels to dig our way through, if we wanted to get anywhere. At least here in Multnomah County we didn't have to worry about the flames actually getting to us.

Things stand to improve, but for many of us, they can't get better fast enough.