Residents Relax a Bit as Fire Threat Eases : New Lightning Prediction Has Northwest Ready for Fight or Flight

Only last week did Bill and Jackie Ross finish the house they had been building with their own hands for four years. Tuesday, they got the word that their labor of love was threatened by the forest fires raking the Northwest.

But on Friday it appeared that the danger had passed. They soaked the yard and cleared out shrubs as a precaution against the fire smoldering on the next ridge line a mile or so away, but they were breathing sighs of relief.

Nevertheless, today and Sunday, these central Idaho mountains are expected to be popping again with the third successive major weekend lightning storm to hit the Northwest.

Smoke Hangs Thickly

“We’ll stay here and fight for it,” a defiant Bill Ross, 46, said of his plans for dealing with any new threat, the smoke hanging thick in the air around him. “The problem is, this could start all over tomorrow.

“If we get a wind, the fire will come through here like Grant through Richmond.”

The Ross’ experience is an example of this month’s wildfire experience for homeowners in the Northwest: each diminished threat has been tempered by the possibility of new lightning storms that could again set the 17,000 firefighters now in the region scrambling to control hundreds of scattered fires.

“Cautious pessimism,” is the way Arnold Hartigan, a spokesmen for the Boise Interagency Fire Center, described firefighters’ fears for the expected lightning assault. The Boise center is the federal government’s command center for combatting wildfires.

Dry Lightning Expected

Hartigan said the weather service is predicting a “36- to 48-hour shot” of dry lightning starting this weekend--storms extending from Northern California through southern Oregon and into the central Idaho mountains.

As of late Friday, the fire center reported 29,915 acres still burning in Idaho, 1,072 in Montana, 5 acres in Nevada and 7,000 in Utah. In Oregon, 51,387 acres were still reported burning, thousands of them in northeast Oregon, a land so ruggedly beautiful it has been called the “Switzerland of North America.”

Since Aug. 2, approximately 600,000 acres have burned, 380,197 of them just since last weekend.

“We’re beginning to get a handle on it,” Hartigan said of progress made in combatting the fires.

All at Once

The fires have been particularly troublesome this year because there have been so many scattered over such a vast area and virtually all at once. “There’s a fond hope and a prayer we’ll not get a bunch of new fires this weekend,” Hartigan said.

The scattered wildfires in the Northwest have been spawned by two unusual outbursts of lightning. Of last Sunday’s assault, Bill Ross says, “It was like sparks on a screen, like an electric bug killer--bzzzt, bzzzt, bzzzt. It was just like that.”

The possibility of widespread rain this weekend gave way to new predictions of more localized thunderstorms on a region already parched into kindling.

Just Up the Road

“We’ve had a dry summer,” said Pat McLane, 68, who lives up a dirt road from the Rosses just outside of Crouch, about 40 miles north of Boise.

Earlier this week, McLane and his wife, Enid, were packed and ready to evacuate; now, some suitcases are open for a ready evacuation. “If we were to get a high wind,” Pat McLane says, “it would be, grab what you can and get the hell out.

“Right now, it looks OK. Or so they tell me.”

“I was ready to leave Tuesday night,” says Enid McLane. “Now it’s one day at a time. I hope it’s under control. We love it up here.

“Except today.”