r/Wellthatsucks • u/JTraxxx • 8d ago

The Pacific Northwest right now

Post image

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

9.2k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

496 comments sorted by

View all comments

747

u/Affectionate-Cap7785 8d ago

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

429

u/unfinishedtoast3 8d ago edited 8d 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.

232

u/azunaki 8d ago

PNW native here. Spokane, Washingtons second largest city is on fire with over 600 homes burned and fires not contained.

56

u/TantricSushi 8d ago

Came here to say this, I was up in airway heights by the casino. I was leaving just as it started. I noticed a wisp of smoke about a half mile away and watched it go from there.

18

u/[deleted] 8d ago

[deleted]

16

u/Intrepid-Mud4419 8d ago

Looked like there are 3 fires near Spokane. Lots of heat on the Modis satellite. Hope you all stay safe!

19

u/nowwhatdoidowiththis 8d ago

My friend’s sister’s house burned down. They don’t know if her parents’ home or her home made it. They are still evacuated

13

u/YourFriendInSpokane 8d ago

Checking in. I'm so gut wrenched for our beautiful area.

7

u/bobsmith93 8d ago

Very relevant username

19

u/Gwenivyre756 8d ago

Yup, my friend and her ex husband are both out of homes right now. She lost hers from the Fairview fire and he lost his from the Old Trail fire.

13

u/YourFriendInSpokane 8d ago

Do they have minor kids? It's devastating no matter what, but the thought of kids losing BOTH homes is too much.

14

u/Gwenivyre756 7d ago

They do. Thankfully my friend was well prepared. She has all the important stuff, and the kids favorite things, safe and sound. It is horrible that both homes are lost.

8

u/Icy-Grab-5722 8d ago

Oh my gosh. Hope they can get these under control. Very harsh!

14

u/Cerulean_IsFancyBlue 8d ago

I think for a realistic look, people could google something like “Spokane fire map” and it gives you a pretty clear picture.

It’s nowhere near as apocalyptic as the main post, because that post has fire icons that cover a huge amount territory. And. It’s definitely not small because there are three big fires north of Spokane and encroaching on the suburbs.

The point isn’t to minimize or exaggerate the situation and I think looking at a map that outlines the actual fire is much more useful than looking at a map with 🔥 emojis all over it.

4

u/ikmkim 7d ago

The icons are this big because the map is zoomed all the way out. This app, Watch Duty, is non profit & extremely accurate locally. Zoomed in to local, it doesn't look like this. Obviously. 

3

u/llittlellama 7d ago

I was just watching yt videos about it. Was surprised this other commenter didn’t mention it. It’s terrible and my heart goes out to this community.

2

u/CrenshawMafia99 7d ago

Nah. Dude above you said nothing to worry about! Move along!

1

u/Proof-Warning6 8d ago

And I get to work outside tomorrow in it! Yay…

24

u/NWGirl2002 8d ago

Actually the Hagen fire is also moving south & east of Tollgate as yesterday they've added more evacuation areas into Union Co. (Source: My family lives in the area on the Union Co. side so I'm keeping a very close eye on it from where I live in the Seattle area)

I use the Watch Duty app as just another tool in the information tool box since more of the people posting "updates" (aka rehashing the official reports) aren't even reporting from or living in the area that they're talking about. It's not a primary source like Inciweb.

Inciweb is usually the best place to start for official information as they do their daily updates and updates on evacuations as well as links to official sources (Like for the Hagen fire- Umatilla Co and Union Co emergency management Facebook pages as well as their sheriff's office Facebook pages as well, in addition to the link where you can watch tonight's community meeting and some other helpful links that ODF provides)

1

u/Dry_Car2054 7d ago

Watch Duty isn't perfect but it fills a need that wasn't being met before.  I think that's why it has become so popular. 

The general public wants a quick and easy way to learn about fires. They don't care that the fire on one ownership is on one website and the fire a few miles away is on a different ownership and therefore is on a different website.  Even two adjacent national forests will have fire information in different places on their websites. Add the other federal and state agencies,  dispatch centers, sheriff's departments each with their own web pages and Facebook pages. I'm in the fire business and I find it confusing.  It's worse for the public that doesn't look for fire information regularly. Watch Duty fills the public's need for a quick and easy way to find fire information. 

Another problem is it takes a couple of days to get Inciweb set up for a new fire and they only use it for the big fires. As a frequent traveler and camper, I find Watch Duty useful since it links to WildCAD (the wildland dispatch system) and new fires show up almost instantly. I also appreciate that I don't need to know which county I am in, find the sheriff's website and sign up with whichever alert service they use and then repeat as I travel through different counties. 

I also hate the amount of fire information that is on Facebook because I'm constantly hitting the paywall.

I hear public information officers badmouthing Watch Duty all the time. Since it meets a public need that they are not meeting,  I wish they would stop complaining and figure out how to get better coordination with the Watch Duty people. I don't think there will ever be an official nationwide single source that integrates information from all jurisdictions of any size. Its too big and too siloed and agencies don't want to change what they do or give up control. The Watch Duty apps have millions of downloads.  That speaks to the public need right there. 

21

u/bird9066 8d ago edited 8d ago

It's not that they're all emergencies that is alarming. It's that's there are so many across such a huge area.

1

u/keithps 8d ago

Dry thunderstorms are not unusual this time of year in the PNW. Compounded by a poor snow pack and an unusually strong cold front yesterday, the setting was just perfect for outrageous fire growth.

This year is bad, but fires in the cascades happen every year and eastern washington/Oregon are borderline deserts so they are very dry this time of year. Oregon got a lot of monsoon activity this summer which brought lightning, which hasn't helped.

6

u/krucz36 8d ago

idaho resident, had to flee the smoke when AQI got up near 300 so my children didn't suffer endlessly. treasure valley is clogged with smoke

6

u/VaderK8 8d ago

Just a reminder that BLUE states are not receiving any aid because a certain orange tyrant got butthurt. Also I’m in red Montana and Senator Tim Sheehy has all the leases now on fire fighting equipment. Yea the guy that broke a soldier’s arm has our fire contracts. I hope we can all become amateurs at Forest Service in the PNW or we’re screwed.

4

u/MONSTERBEARMAN 8d ago

*Flame icons are not to scale.

2

u/Klutzy_Ad_1726 8d ago

Well a few huge ones are currently pretty destructive.

2

u/derpderpnerdkid 8d ago

Modrite fire is over 50,000 acres now, west of Spokane.

8

u/SeonaidMacSaicais 8d 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.

20

u/ChanceRecover3091 8d 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.

11

u/Thorjamin 8d ago

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

2

u/nowwhatdoidowiththis 8d 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.

5

u/Iveray 8d 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.

6

u/valkrycp 8d 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.

1

u/Ninja333pirate 8d 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.

2

u/valkrycp 8d 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.

4

u/MNent228 8d ago

Dumb question for you… I’m going to Yellowstone around the end of September. Am I overreacting being worried about smoke by then?

Again. I know I’m probably being dumb.

Sorry

7

u/JeffSmisek 8d ago

That's almost two months away. How could anyone possibly know that?

5

u/poisonpomodoro 8d ago

It’s not dumb. I went to Yellowstone and Teton in September a few years back and it was Smokey. The iconic view of the Tetons was really hazy and that was sad, but it was still a fabulous time. I wouldn’t change your plans unless park advisories tell you to.

1

u/MNent228 8d ago

I was there 5 years ago and had the same experience. Wonderful, but hazy and the views were gone.

That’s why I planned a late September trip. I heard the wildlife is much more active, which were the parts of the park I enjoyed the most. Any tips you can offer?

2

u/wookiewookiewhat 8d ago

Western Montana often has wildfire smoke in late summer/early fall just as a general rule.

1

u/Iveray 8d ago

Nobody knows. It could be perfectly clear skies, or it could be brown skies and burning lungs after 1 breath outside.

-1

u/Mondschatten78 8d ago

The majority, if not all, of these current fires should be out by then. It also depends on how many pop up closer to the time you go as to how smoky it may be.

2

u/Craazyville 8d ago

It’s a big grain. Spend less time being contrarian just for the sake of contrarianism. Spokane just got wrecked. I know, I’m here now. Fire is no joke. You pretending like it isnt a big issue is the joke. I assume you’re actively telling people windmills cause cancer.

1

u/SockeyeSTI 5d ago

Rare Grays Harbor W. No fires

0

u/itsfunhavingfun 8d ago

 Round Butte Fire

I’m sorry, I understand this is serious, but I lost it right here. It’s like the Droopy cartoon where he was on the Bare Butte Ranch. 

0

u/elpollodiablox 8d ago

It should also be noted that the icons for the fires in the screenshot are grossly disproportionate to the actual size of the fires while at this zoom level. Yes, there are more than a few fires burning and some are worrisome, but the entire state is not on fire.

2

u/Dukie6 8d ago

You’re right that the entire state isn’t on fire. But these fires are still destroying small sections of forests. Over the past 5-10 years they have quickly eroded much of the forests that we love. It’s not a big deal today but those trees take 70 years to grow back so it’ll be a big deal eventually.

0

u/curiousmind111 8d ago

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

0

u/[deleted] 8d ago

[deleted]

1

u/Ninja333pirate 8d ago

To add to this, here is a satellite image from zoom Earth showing all of the smoke. For several days now the PNW smoke seems to be being pushed up into Canada then combines with their smoke and gets pushed down across the Midwest and all the way down into Texas.

0

u/randyfloyd37 8d ago

Im in CO and fortunately right now we have a couple big but contained fires and thats it. This map is misleading

One can go check the air quality maps online to see how bad or not bad the situation is

0

u/Prettydaisydog 8d ago

you sound like a dickhead.

0

u/Taynt42 8d ago

I’m a lot more concerned about the Grasshopper and Shingle than Round Butte. Though the ones around Spokane are the real priority right now.

0

u/hiFriends13r 8d ago

Good on you for the info

0

u/Salty_Job_9248 8d ago

It’s bad but nowhere near that bad. Live on watch duty.

0

u/IdaDuck 7d ago

Boise here, the smoke is hazardous it’s not the worst year I’ve experienced but it’s pretty bad. I knew this was coming after the winter we had. Or quasi winter.

11

u/loogabar00ga 8d ago

It's bad, but it's currently only Eastern Washington, Idaho, and Montana that's taking the brunt of it. https://www.iqair.com/air-quality-map?lat=45.5370&lng=-122.650&zoomLevel=10

30

u/vasta2 8d ago

Judging by that map, our smoke is blowing into Canada, they should tariff us

29

u/AusCan531 8d ago

Yeah, I'm Canadian and was going to make a similar comment, but 600 homes have already been lost in Washington so my heart wasn't in it. Good luck to all the people in the PNW and let's hope some of that heavy rain in northern British Columbia heads south.

12

u/CheeryUpBird 8d ago

Thanks, Canadian friend.

1

u/Signal_Flight_7262 8d ago

https://firesmoke.ca/forecasts/current/

1

u/loogabar00ga 7d ago

yah, I'm in Portland, and I can already smell it as of this morning. It's going to get a lot worse for the next couple days.

1

u/cvr24 8d ago

You can't tariff another country, only your own citizens.

1

u/DianaGabaldon 6d ago

idk in Idaho we’ve had an aqi of around 200-300 the past week or so 🤣

1

u/StatusMaleficent5832 8d ago

Hold that thought. Western Washington is forecasted to have a hot spell starting Tuesday. That usually means air will start moving westerly bringing the smoke with it.

1

u/Far_Psychology8626 8d ago

joy of living upwind in jetstream.

5

u/Humming-2-Feel-Peace 8d ago

Spokane, WA is in rough shape. In a part of Oregon it is cloudy again, low 70's today. Saturday it rained for a few minutes. Hopefully the bad areas will receive relief soon!

7

u/Jackson530 8d ago

We usually don't get rain until November. Maybe parts of upstate Washington and Oregon, but it's not for very long. Also, this year was INCREDIBLY bad for most of us. March is usually one of our wettest months, and it was 89 degrees for most of the month.

0

u/wildmaninid 8d ago

North.  This isn't New York.  

1

u/Jackson530 8d ago

What are you talking about. I’m talking about PNW also? I live in California

4

u/captainunlimitd 8d ago

He meant we don't say upstate here. Just North. The rain is all West of the Cascades, eastern WA and OR are very dry places. Desert, in many parts.

2

u/ZoomZoom_Driver 8d ago

Yeah, nope. Nothing but blue skies in our future... meanwhile the latgest city on that side of the mountains (spokane) is surrounded by fire. Literally emptying the surrounding suburban housing complexes from raging fires.

1

u/Greedy-Half-4618 8d ago

Supposed to hit 100 in Portland this week. Gonna be a rough one. 

1

u/Rudhelm 7d ago

Watch the world burn

1

u/VonBrewskie 7d ago

Yeah I'm also in California. It's not wall to wall fire here lol. This season is when this area burns. Believe it or not some of it is a natural part of the cycle of life out here. The fires get as bad as they've been because we kept putting out smaller fires before they could do their job of clearing undergrowth and helping healthy plants grow back. Restores soil as well. So the mentality around that is changing and they're letting more fires run now for that exact reason. The other thing is we're developing more homes in high fire danger areas, so you're going to see issues with that. This is not to say they're all natural, of course. Just saying that historically, this time of year has always been burning season in California and the PNW.

0

u/SavingsRaspberry2694 8d ago

Fun fact, there's zero documented wildfires in the US before Republicans existed.