Oregon wildfires start to stabilize as California fires threaten vineyards | West Coast

Wildfires that destroyed four central Oregon houses have begun to stabilize, while fires in the north California By far, the Wine Country is exempt from some of the state’s most famous vineyards.

Authorities say moisture helped 1,200 firefighters fight Oregon’s flat fire, but more work needs to be done. Since the fire began Thursday night, dry, hot weather has facilitated the rapid expansion of fires with increasingly fast terrain in Deschutes and Jefferson counties.

“Love Mother Nature. It brings a little rain. Cools the temperature and the relative humidity rises,” said Travis Medema, the state’s chief lieutenant deputy marshal, held a community meeting in the sister town on Monday. “This incident is the first time in the past three days and it has indeed begun to stabilize.”

Firefighters had some sort of protection line around the fire, including roads, but the fire was still under 5% control, officials said.

Authorities ordered the evacuation of more than 4,000 houses at some time, but ordered on Monday for certain areas.

Continuing consultations continue until Wednesday, with forecasters warning that potential thunderstorms could cause unstable winds that would challenge firefighters.

Meanwhile, the Pickett Fire in Northern California scattered about 10 square miles (26 square kilometers) of fires in remote Napa County, known for its hundreds of breweries. Tuesday accounted for 15%.

The flames put the house and the adjoining vineyards in Jayson Woodbridge’s wine, but he said it was a close call when the fire broke out on Thursday and ran along nearby hillsides.

He and his son grabbed the hose and began spraying the steep hillside in vain. “The water evaporates as quickly as we spray it there,” Woodbridge said. “It’s just a hot funnel for the air. The fire just engulfs everything.”

Shortly after, crew members with bulldozers and air support arrived at the property. The water supply helicopter continued to fly on Monday, stuffing the flames into a canyon about 80 miles (130 kilometers) north of San Francisco.

Woodbridge, about a month away from harvest, said his grapes would not be damaged due to the wind direction “pure luck”.

“Smoke doesn’t affect the fruit, because luckily the wind comes in from the west,” Woodbridge said. This was not the case when the toxic smoke from the glass fire caused most of the time to be emitted by Woodbridge and other breweries.

Michelle Novi, a nonprofit trade association, said there were no reports of damage to the vineyards in the Pickett fire.

According to the California Forestry and Fire Department, fire resources have been established to protect the brewery, especially when the winds are extinguished.

“Over the past 48 hours of weather, we have seen high temperatures, low humidity and increasing winds in the late afternoon, which provides our troops with other work on the east side of this incident,” Cal Fire spokesman Curtis Rhodes told the Associated Press on Monday.

Meanwhile, the southwest MontanaA 60-year-old contract firefighter died Sunday afternoon in a heart emergency while fighting the Bivens Creek fire.

Ruben Gonzales Romero is one of more than 700 firefighters working in the Tobacco Root Mountains (Tobacco Root Mountains) about 15 miles north of Virginia, Montana.

Since August 13, the Bivens Creek fire has burned about 3.5 square miles in a remote area of ​​wood and many dead trees.

Residents in the western United States have been stuffy in the heat wave of hospitalization, with temperatures reaching dangerous levels throughout the weekend in Washington, Oregon, Southern California, Nevada and Arizona.

After a triple-digit temperature, authorities in Mutenomah County, Oregon said they are investigating the death of a 56-year-old man, which may be related to heat.

Jason Carr, spokesman for Deschutes County County Sheriff, said the Oregon fires were in a highly desert climate, with hay and juniper trees burning, and the fire was running through the igneous dry canyon areas where I challenged to establish curb lines.

In central California, the state’s biggest fire this year was the Gifford Fire, which burned nearly 206 square meters of dry brushes in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara Counties since the outbreak on August 1. The reason is under investigation.

While it is difficult to directly link a fire or weather event to climate change, scientists say that man-induced warming caused by burning fossils and natural gas, such as coal and natural gas, is causing more intense heat waves and droughts, which in turn lays the foundation for more destructive wildfires.