Akawa Butte Fire, Near Sisters, Oregon - 7/22/2026

[00:00:02]Good morning everyone. Welcome back to the lookout. Today is the 22nd of July.

[00:00:06]This live stream is going to focus on the Aqua But fire which is burning north of Sisters, Oregon in central Oregon.

[00:00:13]We're going to take a look at the current fire conditions uh recent spread and uh weather forecast and try to make some sense of what threat this fire poses to um everything within uh within eyeshot of it. Uh things have been really chaotic in Eastern Oregon.

[00:00:32]So um going to thank our sponsors and get right into it. Thanks for joining us.

[00:00:43][music] [music] >> [music] [music] [music] >> All right, thanks for joining us. Uh, my name is Zeke Lunderer. I live in Northern California and I run this website uh based on my career in wildland fire. I've been working in wildland fire for 30 years. Um helped start uh kind of the first big contracting business that did mapping for the fire teams during wildland fires uh starting in 2000. And so I've kind of been working in at this intersection of mapping and wildfire ever since then.

[00:01:36]And so I used the tools that I developed during my career to uh now kind of explain what's going on with fires.

[00:01:44]Um based in Chico, California. I don't know if I said that. So, let's go right into the maps here.

[00:01:55]So, we're here in central Oregon. Got band right down in here. We got sisters up in here. And we got fires all over central Oregon. A lot of the big lightning fires aren't doing that much right now. Uh they kind of did a lot of big spread and ate a lot of the food or fuel that was available to them. And uh so we'll we'll tour those afterwards, but kind of the big story right now is this Aqua But fire burning north of Sisters. So if we come in here, we got Sisters to the south of the fire. We got Redmond out here to the east. Uh Crooked River Ranch, Black But Ranch uh under my head. Let's move a little here so you can see this Blackb Ranch over here.

[00:02:35]So, the concerning thing on this fire, and we've been kind of watching this fire and uh wondering what it was going to do pretty much since it got started.

[00:02:43]As soon as this fire started, it was kind of clear that this was the fire that had the most potential to threaten communities in in Oregon. And so, um just look at the spread here on the on the this is where it was on the 18th. Uh after the 19th, it was uh it burned about three miles to the west or, you know, southwest. Uh on the 20th it burned another two miles and then yesterday it burned another three miles.

[00:03:09]So seven miles of spread in three days is about 2.3 miles per day. And so often in wildland fire we say that the past kind of predicts the future. So if you're on a fire and it's burning three miles a day, you shouldn't be surprised if it burns three miles again the next day if the weather conditions don't change. So, the thing that's kind of really the big wild card right now on this fire is the weather forecast.

[00:03:37]So, um we'll kind of take a look at that, but there's not a lot of change in fuel type between where the fire is now and where it has been burning. So, we should expect that. Right now, what this um spread we've been seeing shows us is the potential this fire has in this fuelcape under these weather conditions. And it's been pretty dramatic. Like if we look at the um the webcam here starting last night, this fire has just been kind of marching straight through the night. I know these kind of scary blurry images, but um it's striking that the fire has kind of been moving as aggressively as it has been through the through the night. And often we're used to fires kind of laying down at night and we can kind of often times get a handle on them. But right now this is, you know, it's burning basically in a desert in uh continuous fuels. And so we should expect it's going to keep burning well in continuous fuels unless we get a bunch of rain, which isn't really in the forecast.

[00:04:40]So it would be tempting just to say like, okay, it's been moving every day southwest, so let's just draw another line southwest of here. Okay, two days it's going to be in Black but Ranch, but we do kind of have a bit of a pattern change in the weather. So, I think it's kind of important for us to kind of look at the weather. The other thing that's um a factor here in the kind of regional spread of the fire is that this burned last year. Everything in blue here burned in the flat fire last year. Um it has regrown in some grass, but often, you know, one year's grass crop isn't enough to really um for fire spread to really rip, right? Like often your grass crop is got the thatch of previous years in it and so you can accumulate a lot of material and dead grass if it hasn't burned for a long time. So you have another there's some grass that's grown back in this burn scar. So far the fire pretty much pushed into that burn scar and was controllable. So when we look at our winds here and see that we've got forecast for west winds coming. Um, that's a kind of could help as far as the wind not carrying the fire out here in Crooked River Ranch. That and they've had a lot of time to kind of mop up this edge of the fire up here to the north.

[00:05:51]So, let's look at the weather um forecast here. Like I said, we kind of have a pattern change forecast to be more westerly winds. So, if we look out here, um, today our max winds are going to be at 8:00 p.m. They're going to be coming out of the west. Um, we got kind increasing winds, max winds going through Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, but they they're all kind of more out of the west and a little bit northwest. And so that would then would tend to push the fire more this way.

[00:06:28]And so those west wind forecasts are a good thing for Blackb Ranch because we've been getting these kind of northwest northeast winds that push it southwest. So yeah, the wind forecasts are that the fire is going to do more of that. Um I would say that the weather's been really erratic out here and like today we're supposed to have a threat of thunderstorms. there's a a red flag warning for dry lightning. And with thunderstorms, we often get um outflow winds that go in every direction. And so it's not really easy to forecast. You know, you can have kind of larger scale winds that are blowing from the west.

[00:07:02]Doesn't mean the fire is not going to burn into the wind back to the east.

[00:07:07]Sorry, back to the west into the wind.

[00:07:09]So, I think what you have to keep in mind with a fire like this burning in this kind of chaotic, unstable, hot, dry environment is that anything's kind of possible. Uh, when you fight fire in the desert, the winds can change in a moment. The fire can do the bulk of its spread in, you know, a small portion of the day. And so if you're anywhere kind of within 5 milesi of this fire, you should really be um aware of the fact that this thing is really unpredictable and that the weather forecasts aren't that great in general. Um and especially when it comes to kind of erratic thunderstorm type winds, we don't really know what's going to happen. I want to show a few graphics though from um from the this is the last week. This is the wind graph. This is called a wind rose and it's showing that you can really see over the past week the the winds have been very dominantly from the northeast and then uh some of the stronger winds you know about 4 to 8% of the time they've been you know 4 to 8 miles an hour out of that northeast are um temperatures been kind of steady peeking out kind of around 90 and our humidity has been pretty consistent also cratering kind of in the middle of the day. It was a little bit um moistister yesterday, but the fire is still really um spread fine. Right. So, the fuels that this fire is burning in aren't as affected by kind of small changes in humidity. And then you can see real regular pattern in our wind speed and our gusts is that we're kind of getting them in the afternoon and that they're pretty gentle at night. So, the fact that we're having big spread at night under pretty gentle winds is just another indicator of just kind of how dry the fuel conditions are.

[00:08:57]Um, if you look yesterday at the winds, you see that they weren't um even though the fire was cranking, this is interesting I think to me is that even though the fire was moving basically to the southwest, our max winds last night when the fire was making its big run were from the southwest. So that's interesting. You don't, you know, you don't see a lot of north, even though the fire made big runs yesterday from to the southwest, you don't see a lot of northeast winds. Um, except right in the middle of the afternoon.

[00:09:29]So that just tells you another thing about the chaotic kind of nature of like this is a fuel driven fire. It can kind of burn in any direction um where the fuel is. And the we shouldn't you shouldn't pin your hopes and dreams. You know, if we look at the fire weather forecast here and see that the arrows are mainly coming out of the out of the west, um it doesn't mean the fire won't move to the west. And so, I think just take it with a grain of salt. Um there's a lot going on in the forecast right now. And so, um I highly recommend you check out um Michael Snider's Pacific Northwest Weather Watch. It's I think he does a pretty good job of capturing kind of the chaos that we've got in the forecast right now. And I think we'll jump to that real quick to um to some models just to kind of show um well let me before that I I just want to talk a little bit about the um the regional picture. Right now we've got um the effects of smoke on the situation are um they make the modeling harder.

[00:10:31]they affect the amount of sunlight getting down to the the ground.

[00:10:36]And it's just it's pretty hard to predict like the effects of smoke. And it's it's hard to predict weather anyway. But then when you start introducing a lot of smoke, um it creates kind of differences in regional heating versus cooling and it just our models aren't really good at um at kind of figuring out how that smoke's going to affect the the situation.

[00:11:01]One thing I would say though is that the smoke is kind of diminishing a bit because these fires have largely um ate the piece that is available to them.

[00:11:09]Right? So the Brewer fire out here to the east of Madress. It's still been growing like these white lines are uh 4 days ago, 3 days ago, two days ago, and yesterday. Right? So yellow is where the fire was the night before last. Red is where the fire was last night. So you see the Brewer fire is kind of um a lot of it where you don't see yellow on the edge. A lot of this hasn't spread now for a um two days. So this fire is kind of spread kind of off to the east and a little to the south. Uh Box Springs fire as we go up towards John Day Fossil Beds has kind of spread out gently. But compared to like the first couple days of this bust where this fire ran like 130,000 acres in like matter of two days, it's now um it's only gained a couple thousand acres in the past um 48 hours. Little fingers out here kind of in the middle of nowhere. So for the most part, the big lightning bust is kind of run its course in a lot of the flatlands. Um not a lot of new growth out here um on this um forget what they're calling this northern complex. There's not much going on there for growth.

[00:12:20]Got some growth down here on the Henry fire which is um kind of out a little bit more towards um towards burns on about halfway to Burns and the Coyote fire is hardly spread at all. Right. So things are kind of slowed down there on we don't have the whole state on fire like we did a couple days ago as far as smoke production. So that's going to affect our weather. Also fire out here by Baker City, the Powder River fire is hasn't spread much. Bit of spread on the Hagen fire and then this Kaiser Canyon fire up here on Kovville um continues to spread pretty pretty aggressively in a couple different directions as does this Modrate fire. But they're not we're not seeing what we saw like four or five days ago. So that's going to affect our smoke production which might make the forecasting easier, but it's still like we talked about the other day um on here. It's just like Eastern Oregon is like as big as a lot of countries. And so trying to figure out that how the weather that's coming up the coast is going to interact with the coast range going to interact. I mean with the Cascades and then with the desert and with a big tropical storm circulating off the west coast like it's kind of I'd say no one really knows very well what's going to happen. So, if you're anywhere kind of within this picture here um it's worth thinking about like um what you would evac Don't be surprised if you get an evacuation order. If it gets real windy and there's smoke and ash blowing towards you and you still think you're long way from the fire, fires out here can move really fast. So, just have that in mind. If you're not um already packing, be thinking about what you would be packing if you live anywhere within, you know, five, six, eight miles of this fire.

[00:14:10]Okay. So, I want to show a map here, which is um kind of this fire with the um some of the operational details on it.

[00:14:21]It's a little hard to see on this map, but this red line out here is where the fire uh actually is um as of 11 p.m. last night. Um the dotted line is kind of where they guessed. They guessed pretty accurately. And then you've got in here these these hashed black lines are dozer lines that have not held, right? And so they've they've held parts of the fire that were kind of upwind. So, they've pretty much held on to the north and northeast flanks of this fire for uh 3 or 4 days now. And they've got dozer line kind of out ahead of it, but it's definitely kind of gobbled through places that they had dozer line. There's places that it has held, there's places it hasn't, but on this kind of southwest flank of this fire, the fires continued just to kind of uh gobble past all their lines and will continue to do that as long as the wind's blowing. Uh often times, you know, what happens is you you're putting in line here on this flank that's like where the wind isn't blowing and then you get a wind shift and the fire that was the flanking fire and kind of going away from you is now the head fire. So [clears throat] that's one thing that makes firefighting really dangerous in the desert, these rapid wind changes, especially as we get a frontal passage.

[00:15:40]Okay. So, other thing that's important on this map though is for um for Blackbe Ranch and uh Sisters, etc., is that all these areas down here that are cross-hatched are places that there's been uh thinning, fuel treatment, fuel reduction work um kind around the communities. So, you see like 2022, 2025, 2024, like huge amount of work's been done down here kind of along the 20 corridor really for like the last 40 years there's been a huge amount of fuel reduction done. So that is definitely um a helpful thing. You don't see a lot of fuel treatment right up against Blackbe Ranch, but just because it's not mapped doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Like mapping of fuel treatments is kind of notoriously spotty. And so um you never know.

[00:16:24]But that's helpful if the fire does spread in. It doesn't mean it's going to stop the fire, but it does mean that the fire behavior will be reduced and it'll be safer for firefighters and people that are evacuating.

[00:16:40]But I tell you right now, some of the places that are definitely at the most risk are um community down here.

[00:16:48]I turn on a map here that's got some streets for you.

[00:17:00]So, uh, Wilt Road, Canyon Crest, like these neighborhoods that basically that, um, skated through by the skin of their teeth last year during the flat fire are getting it again. Um, kind of no matter what happens with the winds, whether the winds are going to continue to come out of the northwest or they're going to come more out of the west or they come out of the southwest, like right now kind of critical level of threat uh to these communities out here. Luckily, a lot of prep's been done by around them last year uh during the fire.

[00:17:38]You can see this kind of reflected in the evacuation zones. now.

[00:17:49]So, sisters would uh I'm not going to read the comments right away because I I uh I can't multitask and answer questions and everything else.

[00:18:00][clears throat] I was going to jump in and kind of look at the forecast models. I'm not by any means a meteorologist, but I've learned a lot uh over the years here about um about what they can and can't do for you. Basically, what we see happening here is um see if I can turn off my face here. All right. So this is a forecast model for um the kind of pressure high pressure versus low pressure. It just kind of gives you an idea of like where the major like we got this big high parked over the western US. It's been there for a long time. It's keeping things hot.

[00:18:41]That high pressure kind of keeps atmosphere somewhat stable usually and makes it hot. So, we got this tropical storm out here, um, Alida, and she's been moving up the California coast, and once she gets up here, uh, so this is like Friday, then there's going to be kind of a trough, like a a slot of low pressure that's going to push into this high pressure, and that's going to push inland.

[00:19:07]And so, what happens is, uh, winds like to kind of go from high pressure to low pressure. And so as this trough passes through, it's going to make for squirly squirly winds out here in the northwest.

[00:19:21]And how squirly, I can't say. Uh this stuff is like we say, it's very complicated um for even like the experts to really figure out. But that that frontal passage coming through here is going to make for very dangerous conditions going through the weekend. So if we look out here like um just kind of watching how those lines those pressure lines the high here is kind of breaks down lets the low in. And when that happens we're going to have strong winds and that's going to be dangerous for whatever fires on the ground. No matter matter where it is and what direction the winds have been blowing, that's going to make things u dangerous. Not a lot of precept forecast. And then um it's supposed to stay hot.

[00:20:18]So east of the Cascades, we're just we're staying hot here kind of out through the through Saturday, Sunday.

[00:20:23]And then we see like that Saturday through um that Sunday it starts to like we get this kind of quite a bit of cooling. That's that kind of front moving through. But that surge of um of cooler air in is going to create just kind of craziness in the atmosphere. I can't um I can't get that much more eloquent than that. But the other thing that's kind of the wild card here that we have to keep in mind is that we've got these red flag warnings right now for lightning east of the Cascades.

[00:20:54]And so we might have new fires that get started that then are set up to have explosive growth over the weekend. So all in all, it's a pretty watch out situation for um eastern Oregon. The good news here is just that the current fires are dying down except Aqua, but um a lot of the big fires burning out to the east. They're kind of have run a lot of the fuel that's available to them.

[00:21:16]They're calm right now. They might perk up with these u these forecast winds, but the big threat is new starts, big winds on them. And Aqua is just u it's going to be chaotic. You just got to be heads up if you're anywhere near it because we don't I don't know. A lot of the meteorologists don't really know what u is in store with just the kind of chaotic picture we got going on.

[00:21:37]Complicated, hard to model.

[00:21:46]It says so many uh organ someone's got so I'll address some comments now and then I'll jump back to the map as needed. Um [clears throat] I'm trying not to get too predictive of where this fire is going to go exactly just because of the chaos in in the forecasts and the fact that I'm not on the ground and I'm not a legit meteorologist. Just trying to give you my idea of of some of the potential based on what the fire's been doing.

[00:22:10]Like we said, um just the fact that it's burning two or three miles every day tells you that it's got the potential with the current conditions and fuels to do that. And so you just kind of have to draw, you know, like, well, what would it look like if it added on the same shape again today and then again the next day?

[00:22:38]um and do that in any direction basically. And that's you know that's just that's the previous couple days teaching us what this fire can is capable of. You know yesterday it grew here this much. So you could put that out here today and say like well it's possible it's going to go that direction. So I just like to look at potential here.

[00:23:06]Fires are notoriously squirly though in in on the dissutes uh spotting. They're just they're really difficult to contain under under these hot and dry conditions just like fires everywhere.

[00:23:17]Okay. So someone's talking about contract resources sitting. If you're a contractor watching this, I'd love to get your take on it. Uh, one thing I've heard is that there's a new dispatching database for the federal fire contracts and so there were new contracts issued this year in that new database and then that project broke. The database wasn't working and so they've been stalled rolling out this new contracting system and people have been stuck with their previous year's contracts. Um I don't have a lot of detail more on that, but there's things like that that um break down and especially um when you start like firing half the Forest Service um and they go to work for places that treat them better, like little boring things like, "Oh, we don't need that guy. He's just the guy that manages, you know, the contracting database or whatever." And then you're like, "Oh, how come we can't order all these contractors? Oh, uh can we find that guy? Can we get him back? Who was working on that? Anyway, um federal contracting, fire contracting has always been kind of a nightmare. They've the government does not do it well. And so they build these um these pretty janky databases and then like all of us contractors are like praying hoping and praying that we're going to get like there's like two or three calls a year that make our entire year and then you like don't get one because like they couldn't find your phone number. Like it's always been a nightmare.

[00:24:38]Um, spot weather forecasts. Yes. U, that's a good point. Let's, uh, someone's asking about spot weather forecasts, and I haven't, I didn't think to check for that, but um, if you go spot forecast monitor in Google, um, you'll find it. And then you can zoom in on this map. And these are all places that buyers have asked meteorologists to create them a spot weather forecast.

[00:25:07]And so, um, Aquabute. So, here's a spot weather forecast. They're kind of old. What happens is, um, once the fire is up and running, they have a meteorologist there on scene, and that meteorologist will um, do that stuff for them.

[00:25:27]Let [clears throat] me see this one other spot if I can look here.

[00:25:32]Um, give me a second. Got to do this off the side.

[00:25:49]I was going to see if I could find incident action plan, but I can't. So, uh, sorry about that. But anyway, this um spot forecast page, if you're on if you're looking for a fire that's just getting started or they don't have a team on it yet, you can come in here, you click on it, and then um you can get it supposedly, and this will be um what they what the National Weather Service made for the people that put in the request. So, this is a couple days old, but it give you an idea of what kind of um these are really handy if you're on a fire. This is what goes into kind of your briefing the first couple days and then eventually the fire gets a meteorologist on it and they'll give you this every day on site.

[00:26:30]They don't have to request it.

[00:26:33]Coming back to um this national uh this is a forecast discussion for the Pendleton, Oregon. And this is also a good resource if you're a little bit more um technical and geeky about your weather. You can check out the spot or the the area forecast discussion and it'll say like uh sensible weather concerns through Thursday continue to revolve around strengthening upper level ridge producing hot temperatures.

[00:27:01]Eastern Oregon and daily shortwave impulses riding up the ridge tapping into monsunal moisture and increasing instability. So they've got a nice little thesaurus or little dictionary here if you don't understand what an upper level ridge is. It'll like tell you. So, good stuff. If you really want to like up your weather game, check out the area forecast discussions and you can find the weather station, you know, weather service office near you.

[00:27:27]They say late Thursday through the weekend, there's a good agreement that the upper trough will develop off the coast, meaning the low will kind of push in and u it'll the southwest flow loft will prevent monsunal moisture from advecting, resulting in drying conditions.

[00:27:44]And so the proximity will result in breezy west to northwest winds through the Cascade gaps. And so what's important about that is um thinking about how the Cascade Mountain Range affects your weather, your how your winds come through. Like uh winds are kind of like water. They want to take the path of least resistance. And so if we look at the mountains here, come over the other side of the mountains and kind of duck down low here, passes where your highways go through are also places where your wind comes through. So if you're expecting kind of big strong west uh winds that are going to squirt through the gaps, you want to look at like where that is.

[00:28:29]And so that kind of can set up like if you look at where we are here, we've got these Mount Jefferson and we got um the sisters over here, Mount Washington. And so basically you got a low spot in the Cascades here out to the west where winds can pour over either coming from the west or the east.

[00:28:46]And so that definitely that gap there could definitely push concentrate these winds and push them out push the fire out to the east. Like we said here, you've got this big burn scar that um hopefully could help stop that fire. Uh there is grass in there. We have a lot of open flank on this fire. So here's kind of a textbook kind of example of um what what you learn in fire behavior school is about frontal passages. So let me just uh got to turn off this distracting line here.

[00:29:26]So, say um when you get a frontal passage um say your your fire is basically this shape because it's had northwest winds for days, northeast winds for days and then as the front moves through and you get if you get northwest winds then all this area here that was your flank now becomes your head.

[00:29:51]Very dangerous. So that's why when we look at this trough moving onshore u we're alarmed is that you know if oftenimes you you have a frontal passage and you go from like your prevailing winds being southwesterly and then the once the front moves past you get these northwest winds that come in after the front and so that does the same thing. You got a fire that starts and it becomes kind of moving this direction southwest wind and then that frontal passage happens and now this whole flank becomes the head. So it's kind of a textbook watch out weather situation. That's why we learn to like be really aware of cold fronts and other um kind of frontal passages is that radical change in your fire behavior that comes after a frontal passage.

[00:30:39]>> [clears throat] >> Watch duty sung spot fires on the western edge near black but all right. Well, what we'll do is we'll update our um perimeter here off the side and load up and see what they got because we we can get the same parameters as watch duty here.

[00:31:01][cough] [clears throat] So, I will say these webcams are um an amazing resource for um for doing this kind of work. You know, basically there's some tricks with them like um can't really see it right now because um a little covered up, but I will say if you're a webcam fan, check out down here in the corner.

[00:31:31]Um, it gives you the compass bearing of where you are on the webcam. This is the alert west.live page. And in here, so like you can come in here and look at like where the fire was 6 hours ago and say it's, oh, it's at 312 degrees. And then if you have a way mapping tool, you can come to the webcam and draw a line at 312 degrees.

[00:31:56]Andy. So, let's come back and update our parameters and see what Watchd Duty's got that we don't.

[00:32:16]All right. Well, I'm not seeing any um Oh, there's a couple little spots out here. It's all I see. I don't see anything over on Black. Let's see what Watchd Duty's got going on.

[00:32:33]Yeah, I don't see any spots. Anyway, watch duty if you don't already have it.

[00:32:36]You probably do, but um they got all the evacuation zones in there and those red areas are just kind of a good indicator what the fire team is worried about happening in the near future.

[00:32:47]But like like we were saying like anywhere on this map basically even if you're not in evacuation warning or um notification like just be be heads up that uh this is a dynamic fire and anything could happen.

[00:33:03][clears throat] Yeah. Someone else is plugging Michael Snder Pacific Northwest Weather Watch.

[00:33:09]Um he also does California Weather Watch. He's really good at explaining his stuff. I've learned a lot from watching him and he's got um he's just got it pretty dialed. So go over and check him out. Um for your weather, check me out for your fire behavior and uh hot spots. That's where they're hot spots.

[00:33:33]Spotting just shows you like why fires are hard to put out.

[00:33:40]Another tool we use here is the called the VERS and Noah satellite. Um they basically are showing the same thing that our mapping from uh fire center is showing.

[00:33:54]They update the watch duty map every time they get a new perimeter. And on these fires usually the perimeters are being fly flown at night. If it's in California they um they fly often you know multiple times a day but most places some place in Colorado's got a custom mapping aircraft but most places they fly an infrared flight in the middle of the night. They upload it.

[00:34:13]This mapping here was down at 11:30.

[00:34:16]Fire spread a little past that, but um you know, judging by the webcams. I took a kind of compass shot from the from the webcams and um it wasn't showing much.

[00:34:26]It wasn't showing greatly spread since 11:30.

[00:34:32][clears throat] Another thing that to know about the the heat satellites is just that um they're not they're not bulletproof.

[00:34:41]They often u the thing to think about with those satellites that I think is useful as far as limitation is that they're way out in outer space like thousands and thousands of miles out. So that sat when you get that the VERS satellite going over like it might be out over Utah or something and it's shooting way down at an angle from way out in space and so um and it's projecting a line out and it says oh there's heat out here at like you know 30° off my um off my perspective and it calculates and says okay well 30° at that angle uh from you know 5,000 miles in space or whatever it is is this little pixel right here. Well, if you got a big column of fire, it's seeing heat up here, like above the fire, and it thinks that it's in this pixel out here. And so, anytime there's a big fire run, you'll see that the VERS and the modus satellites create these like kind of patchwork of squares way from the fire. Usually, that's it's picking up heat in the column and it's misapplying it to a vector that it thinks is on the ground out here. So you got to you got to use the kind of verge heat data as kind of in reference to something else.

[00:35:54]Like you check the vers like, "Oh, it made a big run. Let's check the webcam and see if that's actually there." Um, but you can't just kind of report on um you can't take that stuff at total face value, especially when fires have giant columns on them.

[00:36:10][clears throat and cough] All right. Well, um like I said, be um caught don't let yourself get too freaked out by the heat satellite stuff. Um, unless you got another confirmation, another data source that tells you that like we look at the webcams here right now, they're a little smoky. But, um, [clears throat] but usually you want to corroborate that with something else.

[00:36:52]This panorama on the um website on the webcam site also has the the direction down in the bottom here down in here. That'll give you a shot.

[00:37:09]And it's also handy on this as you move across here. It shows you up on this map the direction that you're you're pointing at. So, if you see like some smoke out here, like I see smoke right out here, and it's like, okay, well, that's inside the burn that they're showing on this map.

[00:37:24][clears throat] I don't think there's an open source for incident spot weather data. I think it's that stuff goes into their IP.

[00:37:41]Uh, will Aqua be fire be active day?

[00:37:44]Yes, it will be.

[00:37:51]Hey everybody, Michael Snider here.

[00:37:53]>> All right, I like got some good quotes here.

[00:38:04]Hey guy Marquette. Um, there's a good this guy here, Guy Marquette, um, retired firefighter, longtime watcher of the Lookout says, "Hey guys, I'm having a rough time lately being estranged from hell attack with recent bad events and a lot of smoke back here in my hometown, forcing a lot of memories, not sleeping much. My current life rebuild is all around people who don't understand what I did, and I try to stay informed and mentally engaged, but it's hard to drive a bus and not have any role anymore."

[00:38:39]Hear you. I hear you, guy. Um he's talking there's been three Helltech burnovers in the last four weeks and um and it's hard it's always hard to tell like why why is that happening? Why are there uh there's CalFire rolled an engine yesterday. CalFire had some people get burned day before yesterday.

[00:39:00]Um it's hard to tell. Is this the way it always was? Is it because we have a lot of turnover? Uh but yeah, it's upsetting to a lot of us who um who spend our lives in fire. I was I was awake last night at like 3:00 in the morning thinking about this broadcast and like okay like looking at these getting up and looking at these flaming webcams and it brings back memories for me the Dixie Fire and so there's all these layers. Um, everyone's triggered differently by this, right? U, but guy, man, I hope you can talk to some friends and u, >> it's a good time always to reach out to your your your buddies if you can find them if they're around. Um, tough times. Tough times, fire people. I wrote an essay about this stuff. Um, I think I'd like to share with you guys.

[00:39:50]Um if you get on the website, check out um unfair math, weighing firefighter safety against everything else. Uh it's just some thoughts I had about um these accidents and I see people in Facebook um mainly Facebook, not in real life. Um that are saying firefighting needs to be more aggressive. We need to accept more risk. Why are we have firefighters at all if they're not willing to do dangerous And uh this is an ongoing argument. Every generation thinks that the uh generation that comes after them is uh less capable and less uh steadly and less macho and less everything. And um and it's kind of kind of a tough thing to watch unfolding is this like this idea that we have to fight fires more aggressively at the same time that um our fires are behaving more and more um erratically and dangerously. And so if we look at this kind of 24-hour time lapse of of this fire here we're talking about like all right smoky all day. you got you're out there eating smoke all morning and then in the afternoon we're going to order up a confilration and we're going to try to fight it through the you know wildest time of the day. Um and then it's going to be smoky all day and then it's going to take off again.

[00:41:15]But we're in this kind of extraordinary intersection of drought and 100 years of putting out every fire and government breakdown and um climate change that is increasingly making it more and more dangerous. At the same time that people are telling us that we need to go back and just do what they did in the 1960s and 70s um without taking any responsibility for the fact that what they did in the 1960s7s 80s created the conditions that our force are in now. So just keep putting out the fire like we did in the 70s and 80s.

[00:41:51]Quit being such wusses. Um don't complain. Don't say that you're scared.

[00:41:57]Don't uh Yeah. Anyway, I think it's Uh I think that I think they're u they're right that yeah, if we can put the fire out soon, sooner than later, we don't have it burn for weeks. But often times the fire doesn't not get put out because um people were weak and uh afraid and only concerned about their own self-care. It didn't get put out because it was spotting like like that, right? Like you're not going to go out and like even if you're in a bulldozer with air tankers, you're not going to pick up stuff like that. Fire spotting at night, right? This is a this is 11 at night, right? And the fire's like spotting and cranking uh across the landscape.

[00:42:43]nighttime before climate change often was a time that the fires laid down and you could actually go out there and do the manly work that uh that these these geysers are telling us we need to do now. Uh they didn't have often these and they're like, "Oh, conditions haven't changed. There was all, you know, blah blah blah blah blah. There's heavy fuels and the ground's still as steep as it was before." But there's things that have changed. Climate change is like it's real and it affects things like, you know, 3 or 4 degrees warmer temperature at night means maybe that the fire doesn't lay down and you can't go direct like you used to. So, I don't know. I'm kind of tired of the of of hearing it. It's worth arguing about, but it's also like take some responsibility and accept that conditions are completely different than they were 40, 50, 60 years ago when you were on Hot Shot Crew back in the day.

[00:43:38]guy. Where do you live?

[00:43:46]Oh, there's there's also just to kind of respond to this in this current theme, this guy um was saying yesterday um on Facebook like, "Yeah, we got to be more aggressive in firefighting." Um, as a forester, it's like, well, do we need to be more aggressive firefighting in monoculture plantations that um that foresters have been creating for years to like so we can protect the the profits of Red Emerson and Warehouser and these other, you know, real estate investment trusts like John Hancock. You know, you're asking like me to send my kid out to like go direct on a fire that's like burning like the sun because it's in a chaper fuel model that's basically uh 10x10 plantation that is planted without any slash cleanup like that. I'd say, yeah, let's be aggressive where u we're going to save a watershed or salmon habitat or um you know, old growth forest, but like risking lives to protect like John Hancock's timber investment.

[00:44:48]Crazy. Like maybe maybe we got to get the forest practices to be a little more um in line with the current climate reality.

[00:45:00]Are fire tornadoes becoming more common?

[00:45:03]I don't know. I haven't heard about that many. Um, all in all, like you they make good video and like legit like actual fire tornadoes um don't happen very often, but um extreme weather like the biggest fire tornado I know of burn in Reading and toppled transmission towers and killed people.

[00:45:24]It was like 108 degrees or something.

[00:45:26]So, I think extreme weather makes extreme fire behavior more likely.

[00:45:37]Um, do I think AquaBute will be worse today than it has been? Let's just look at the daily forecast.

[00:45:51]The humidities today aren't um critically dry, but the fuels are. And the temperature today is pretty hot.

[00:46:01]It's pretty windy. Check this out though. Like check out how the wind is like coming from the northeast and then it when we start to get gusts in the afternoon, it suddenly switches and comes from the west. So that major shift in wind is going to be a problem, right?

[00:46:18]Because it's saying basically that this afternoon we're going to start to get pretty strong westerly winds and we just haven't had that as much. And so that um when we're looking at that previous like spotting out here that was right at the you know I pointed out those spots and I was like yeah they spotting at night. That's right when they flew it. You can see the same some of that same spotting out there. So um once we get a westerly on that it's going to blow a lot of this new fire this way.

[00:46:52]I think that's that's kind of one of the problems. thing to look out for today I'd say is a shift westerly winds and the fire pushing out this direction. You can see that there's really sparse fuels out in here like probably a previous fire scar.

[00:47:08]Yeah, there's a fire scar out here from 1991.

[00:47:12]So that's just finer fuels. The problem is that like we're having problems with being able to fly tankers because of smoke. So if we look at kind of current conditions like you can't really fly right now in the morning when the fire is kind of behaving itself because the smoke and then if we look at kind of the previous 24 hours um when it finally does clear out enough that you can actually um see. So like here this is at noon and then the fire starts to blow up around you know early afternoon. And so you have this really narrow window where you can actually use tankers where it's either daylight or not smoked in. And then even during the day here, you can see um like yesterday at 5:00 p.m. it's smoked in at the head. So you can't drop it anywhere really close.

[00:48:09]So that's why like say, "Oh, we need more air tankers. We need more DCT10s, 747s." It's like often you just don't get the window of opportunity at the time that you need it to use those aircraft.

[00:48:21]And it's like okay like when it's laying in like this like yeah they might these they're really good at sneaking in and finding where they can drop but as long as the conditions are like doing this all night like we can't go dig line put firefighters right along the edge of that. And we can get bulldozers in a lot of this country. And when we see the spotting that it's doing like that's your dozer line being lost right there. That's what happens.

[00:48:50]Little rain forecast today. Uh let's see. Let me look back here.

[00:48:58]Yeah, it says there's a probability of precipitation middle of the day.

[00:49:03]Can't hurt. Can't hurt. But it also um you know likely is coming with kind of gusty outflow winds.

[00:49:14]All right.

[00:49:21]Will lightning tonight create more spot fires? Yes, likely. Do we have enough resources to handle a lot of new fires?

[00:49:26]No, we don't. Um someone says large scale land owners should fund their own firefighters. Maybe they do. Um, in western Oregon, uh, we've got like the Douglas and Cous protective associations are like industry groups that are funded by the industry and are kind of co-ops of like, um, logging equipment and everything else. But when it comes down to it, like ODF, they're spending a ton on the millions and millions of dollars like say on Evans Creek Road um, that the industry isn't having to pay for.

[00:50:04]All right. Well, back to the mental health stuff. Um, good luck, guy. I hope I hope you can find some folks to talk to about about it. Fire seasons uh fire season's triggering for those of us who spend our lives kind of with that sense of purpose. I think finding a new purpose sense a new sense of purpose is like I haven't I haven't found it yet.

[00:50:24]That's why I'm on I'm on YouTube talking about fire all the time cuz you know we kind of get juiced up on the adrenaline of these moments and um it's hard to let go of it even though we know it's bad for us, right? Firefighting is addictive. Being with your friends on fire is addictive and when you're not doing it, you wish you were and then when you are doing it, you wish you're doing anything else. Um so yeah, finding that finding that way forward after a career in fire. I think I haven't figured it out yet. A lot of people I know are going to like write fire plans till the day they die because uh they want to be part of it still. It feels good to be part of something.

[00:51:01]So anyway, I wish I had like a crystal ball and I could tell you like where this fire is going to be in 24 hours and I don't. Um but I think just the takeaway should be this fire is dangerous. It's got a lot of potential.

[00:51:12]Weather's um really kind of volatile for the next um foreseeable future. And don't be surprised if this fire does things that surprise you, you know, whether that's it making a huge run out to the west through this burn scar, which I kind of don't think is going to happen. Uh but anything's possible. Um take care of each other. If you want to kind of dig deeper into a lot of stuff, we have uh reports on the lookout here. We have u morning reports on the fires from yesterday. uh looking at all the fires that are burning around Eastern Oregon. Uh I'll update some maps on the website this morning, too. But we try to give you kind of a fire education here. So, if you want to just kind of spend your day learning about um if you're going to doom scroll about fire stuff, come doom scroll on the lookout. We got hundreds and hundreds of articles on here about all kinds of stuff that um we think's interesting. And you can also check out our merch. Um, join the lookout lookout club. Got hats, got stickers. Uh, my wife makes pottery and makes mugs. And that's a way you can keep the lookout on the air. Appreciate it because everything's helpful here. Keep the lookout looking out.

[00:52:36]Okay, a couple more comments and I'm gonna got to get on with my day.

[00:52:43]Thanks, Ben.

[00:52:47]Someone says, "Runstone Ranch is a retreat for first responders. Peer support, reach out, talk.

[00:53:01]Thanks, Ben. I want to see your merch."

[00:53:06]>> [laughter] >> Ben Ben had to give make a lot of comments to get his purple number one crown. I've never I've never had one.

[00:53:17]All right, people. I'm get out of here.

[00:53:19]But we're going to play our old funky music to to see out. How many miles do I think the fire will run today? I think it'll burn two. Two or three in some unknown direction.

[00:53:33]Heat. Heat. N.

[00:53:36][music] [music] Heat. Heat. N.

[00:53:49][music] Wow, [music] down.

[00:54:14][music] Heat. Heat.

[00:54:19][music] [music] >> [music]