Wet weather douses Oregon’s fire season

EUGENE – Oregonians are in store for a solid week of rainy weather – but there’s one silver lining, though soggy: rain and hail have pretty much doused the wildfire season of 2007.

The U.S. Forest Service has reduced its five-point warning level down to one, the lowest possible level of alert.

“Over the next six or seven days, we’re going to have several different weather systems move in,” said Terry Marsha, a Portland fire meteorologist. “They’ll put a pretty good wetting rain over almost all areas of Washington and Oregon.”

Even when it isn’t raining, winds from the west bring in moist air.

Fires that start in these conditions are tamer and easier to control. Rising nighttime humidity moderates the flames.

The unstable air brings fewer lightning strikes to the dry east sides of Oregon and Washington, and those electrical storms that do come are accompanied with rain.

The season is ending without the major burns of some years in the Northwest. Large fires charred 735,000 acres in Washington and Oregon this year, compared with 865,000 acres last year, said Mike Fitzpatrick at the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center in Portland.