Smoke blows in, raises tensions

B) The Biscuit Fire southwest of Grants Pass, Ore.; or

C) Fires burning in central Washington, including the Deer Mountain Fire near Chelan and the Oak Creek 2 Fire near Yakima.

On Friday afternoon, the smokey haze was so heavy that Mt. Hood was not visible from downtown White Salmon. Mt. Adams was also obscured. The view east and west along the Columbia River also was a smokey one.

Residents were naturally concerned about the possibility of a major fire in the local area.

"I wondered where the fire was that created all the smoke," said White Salmon resident Doug Holliston. "Someone said it was dust, which I could not believe. It covered Mt. Hood and behind it, so I thought it was south of Mt. Hood."

Those working in public places got a lot of questions.

"Everybody was asking," said Lynde Curtis, an employee at Riverview Bank.

Alan Journeaux, another Riverview employee, joked that they considered turning the bank's time and temperature sign into a message board to read: "We don't know what's going on!"

At first, even Klickitat County Sheriff Chris Mace did not know the origin of the smoke and dust.

"That was kind of nasty looking. For awhile, we couldn't be sure where that was all coming from," Mace said.

The correct answer may be a combination of all three of the sources listed above, but according to one of the top fire coordinators in the region, the smoke -- aided by a southbound wind -- came primarily from the Deer Mountain Fire near Chelan.

The fire is in the Wenatchee National Forest, seven miles northwest of Chelan.

"It's close enough to the Columbia River that it dumps in," explained Pete Peterson, fire management officer for the U.S. Forest Service in Hood River. "That's why we're getting all the smoke; it's filtering down the Columbia River west of Wenatchee. I suspect it's a significant fire if we're getting this much smoke down here."

According to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, the Deer Mountain Fire had burned about 43,000 acres as of Tuesday.

Another major fire in Washington was burning northwest of Spokane on Tuesday. The Spokane Complex Fire covered nearly 2,000 acres and was threatening approximately 50 homes. It was listed at 20 percent contained as of Aug. 20.

Peterson said fire crews were spread thin across the Northwest and are often on the move.

"They get off one fire and go to the next one," he said. "It's an emotional issue, and hard on folks [firefighters] to see homes burned like we had in Murdock [Aug. 10-11]. They don't like to see houses burned. They always wish they could do more."

Meanwhile, the wildfire near Glenwood, which burned about 25 acres on Aug. 12-13, was being mopped up. It was contained as of Aug. 14.

"We had several hundred people fighting it at its height," Peterson said.

No homes were lost.

According to Peterson, lightning storms are expected later this week, increasing the threat of new wildfires.

Peterson said the ongoing firefighting efforts were straining resources. He pointed out that the U.S. Forest Service had been budgeted $343 million for fire suppression in its 2002 budget, but that was completely inadequate for the conditions the agency has faced this year.

"The projected cost of firefighting this year is $1.8 billion," he noted.

The largest fire in the Northwest is Oregon's Biscuit Fire, which as of Aug. 20 had burned 475,000 acres in the Siskiyou National Forest, southwest of Grants Pass.

The Biscuit Fire, which was reportedly caused by lightning, was approximately 50 percent contained as of Tuesday.

"If the humidity gets below 20 percent, it's considered extreme," Peterson said. "It's in single digits there now."

Peterson urged residents and visitors in the area to be extremely careful about the risk of fires.

"It doesn't take much to get something up and going. Even a cigarette," he said.