DURKEE, Ore. — Bert Siddoway heard the fire before he saw it, no seconds at all between the flash of lightning and the boom of thunder. The strike “shook the whole flipping town,” he said, and immediately ignited a wildfire in a hard-to-reach spot in the hills above the community where he is both a rancher and captain of the rural volunteer fire department.
On July 20, three days after it started, the Durkee Fire was 15 miles wide and moving at 30 mph, and was, for a time, the largest wildfire in the nation. Fueled by dry grasslands, the fire jumped over Interstate 84 near the Oregon-Idaho border, closing the road to traffic for several days and cloaking the region in smoke. Last month, pine trees reduced to snags continued to puff smoke from embers smoldering deep within. The once-tawny hills, scattered with sagebrush and pines, were charred black as far as the eye could see.
“By the first of August when fire season is supposed to start, we were burned out,” Siddoway said, on a tour of the fire damage. “For a while, it looked like the whole world might burn.”
As the Durkee Fire burned in eastern Oregon, other major fires blazed at the same time across Oregon and Washington, straining both national and state resources. Fire crews were so strapped nationally that firefighters from Virginia with little experience with range wildfires were the only personnel available. When the fire season began to ebb at the end of September, 1.9 million acres in Oregon had burned — a state record.