A6 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 , 2020
the National Weather Service is-
sued a red flag warning for Sun-
day, with warm weather, low hu-
midity and strong winds creating
tinderbox conditions in the area
along the state’s southern border.
“This will help alleviate some of
the smoke in the region, but will
also increase fire danger,” the serv-
ice said.
The South Obenchain Fire had
burned roughly 30,000 acres in
the central part of the county and
was menacing several small
towns, including Eagle Point and
Butte Falls. Another f ire was burn-
ing near Medford, Ore., the county
seat. Residents were under evacu-
ation orders or warnings.
“Residents in these areas
should continue to take precau-
tions by keeping defensible space
around their homes free of flam-
mable materials, gutters clear
etc.,” the National Weather Service
said in a technical forecast discus-
sion posted online. “If you don’t
have a ‘go bag’ ready, now is a great
time to prepare.”
Dry, windy conditions were also
forecast in northeastern Califor-
nia and western Nevada, accord-
ing to the National Weather Serv-
ice.
In Portland, 23-year-old Blazed-
ol Howard wore a respirator mask
as he walked through the deserted
streets downtown to get breakfast
at a 7-Eleven. He said he had re-
cently flown into the city from
Indiana to march in Black Lives
Matter protests and could smell
the smoke during the plane’s de-
scent. As he stepped out of the
airport, the air felt suffocating.
When Howard reached the 7-
Eleven, it was already boarded up
from the riots downtown, along
with most businesses in the city.
Across the state, other stores, cof-
fee shops and restaurants — some
of which had just recently re-
opened after closing for the pan-
demic — taped signs on their
doors reading, “Closed due to the
air quality.”
A few blocks from where How-
ard was, Christopher Murillo and
his husband, Leo Cruz, braved the
smoke to walk their three dogs
and pick up coffee from Starbucks.
The smoke was “excruciating,”
Murillo, 33, said. “It’s itchy, like a
constant dry mouth, like wanting
to hack up something and it’s all
this white nasty stuff.”
They haven’t seen the sun for
days, said Murillo, who grows or-
ganic produce and flowers with
his husband. The skies are de-
pressing, and the haze is inescap-
able — even at night.
“It’s like trying to gasp for air
while you’re drowning,” he said.
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]Hawkins and Mufson reported from
Washington, and Schmidt reported
from Oregon. Paul Kane and Tom
Hamburger contributed to this report
from Washington.change.
“It’s just a big and devastating
lie,” Merkley said of Trump’s state-
ments. “The Cascade snowpacks
have gotten smaller. Our forests
have gotten drier. Our ocean has
gotten warmer and more acidic.”
The changes, Merkley added, are
the “consequences of a warming
planet.”
“We need to have a president
follow the science,” he said.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcet-
ti (D) also accused Trump of negli-
gence in responding to the fires. In
an interview with CNN, he sug-
gested the president was reluctant
to help California, Oregon and
Washington because they have
Democratic governors.
“Leadership at the very top
needs to be stronger, earlier,” Gar-
cetti said, alleging that Trump’s
“blaming of blue states over red
states” in how he handles natural
disasters hurts the federal re-
sponse.
“We need leadership that is
equal across this country, instead
of being partisan and divisive,”
Garcetti said.
Police and social media compa-
nies have been trying to stamp out
false allegations that anti-fascist
activists had set the fires. Face-
book on Saturday said it would
take down erroneous posts with
such allegations.
Some climate activists said that
even if climate was one of a combi-
nation of factors contributing to
the fires, that was still dishearten-
ing.
“It is most distressing that these
impacts are happening so much
faster than were predicted,” Quig-
ley said. “We are seeing disruption
we thought we would see a decade
or more from now, which demon-
strates how little we really under-
stand about feedback loops.”
As the fires raged, emergency
crews got some reprieve over the
weekend as strong winds died
down and cooler, moister weather
moved in over some of the region.
The Riverside Fire in Clacka-
mas County near Portland had
blackened more than 132,
acres as of Sunday morning, but
officials said its growth had
slowed. Evacuation warnings in
Oregon City, Sandy and Canby
were downgraded from Level 2 to
Level 1, meaning the imminent
risks were lower but that residents
should be prepared to evacuate if
the flames start encroaching
again.
To the south, some evacuation
orders for California’s deadly
Northern Complex Fire were lift-
ed Sunday, and the San Francisco
Bay area division of the National
Weather Service was optimistic
about air quality. “The smoke off
the coast looks a little more dilut-
ed today,” it wrote on Twitter, say-
ing winds will “greatly help clear
us out in the coming days.”
Elsewhere, the weather showed
signs of worsening.
In rural Jackson County, Ore.,tor of the education group Stand
for Children, said the organization
has shifted much of its attention
from school programs to doing
“triage” for food security, housing
assistance and other emergency
needs of families and teachers.
The group had secured $500 mil-
lion in tax revenue marked for
education, but with the pandemic
all but $150 million has been di-
verted to other priorities.
President Trump is slated to
visit California on Monday for a
briefing with emergency officials.
Aside from a Friday night tweet
thanking responders for their
work, the president has said little
publicly about the blazes, which
have wiped out entire neighbor-
hoods and towns and destroyed
vast tracts of land.
At a speech in Nevada over the
weekend, Trump blamed the fires
on poor forest management and
boasted about the United States
leaving the international climate
agreement. He made a similar re-
mark at a rally in August, saying,
“You’ve got to clean your floors,
you’ve got to clean your forests.”
On Sunday, Sen. Jeff Merkley
(D-Ore.) pushed back on Trump’s
characterizations, telling ABC
News’s “This Week” that the dev-
astation was the result of a combi-
nation of ills, including rising tem-
peratures caused by global climateBridges, buildings and roads
were shrouded in an eerie gray fog.
Visibility was a quarter-mile or
less in some places, according to
the National Weather Service,
making it dangerous to drive and
hindering firefighters.
“Our challenges remain re-
duced visibility, limiting our aerial
reconnaissance, and rapidly
changing fire conditions,” Clacka-
mas County fire officials said in a
statement Saturday.
The wildfires have displaced
tens of thousands of people in
what officials have called an un-
precedented disaster. The death
toll reported was likely to rise as
emergency crews began sifting
through the wreckage, officials
said.
In California, record-shattering
wildfires have charred more than
3.2 million acres and have been
linked to 24 deaths since last
month. Three of the top four Cali-
fornia wildfires are burning now,
according to the state. In Washing-
ton state, blazes have burned more
than 665,000 acres of land and
clogged the skies with smoke.
The fires come on top of the
pandemic, which had already hob-
bled schools and businesses.
Large numbers of schools in
Oregon announced they would be
closed until further notice. Toya
Fick, the Oregon executive direc-the backwoods of Marion County,
the smoke was so bad he had to
wear a mask inside. Unaware of
evacuation orders, he was walking
down his street Friday night when
a neighbor drove up and told him
to get in the car. With only his dog
and the clothes he was wearing,
Warner let the neighbor drive him
to an evacuation site at the Oregon
State Fairgrounds, where he spent
the night.
“My throat burns,” said Warner,
his eyes swollen and watering as
he ambled around the site with his
dog.
Thomas Keyzers, 36, had hoped
that he’d left behind the worst of
the smoke when he, his wife and
two children, ages 3 and 5, evacu-
ated their home in Happy Valley.
But the smoke followed them to
Portland, even inside the hotel
where they were staying.
He and his wife have been
coughing constantly, and it’s get-
ting worse each day. He’s worried
about the health of his kids, he
said. “It’s just like a 24-hour camp-
fire,” he said. “You can only take so
much of it.”
Officials and health experts
urged residents to stay indoors
unless absolutely necessary, keep
doors and windows closed, and
use fans and air conditioners to
keep air circulating in their
homes.set. The sky gets a little bit brighter
and a little bit darker and that’s
how you know the day is starting
or ending,” said Eileen Quigley,
founder and executive director of
the Clean Energy Transition Insti-
tute in Seattle.
The thick haze smothering the
landscape has deepened the crisis
brought on by the blazes, which
officials have linked to at least 10
deaths in Oregon as dozens re-
mained missing.
In many parts of the state, the
air quality ranked among the
worst in the world, as bad as Bei-
jing’s 2013 bout of pollution,
which was widely branded the
“airpocalypse.” The smoke made
the air potentially life-threatening
for people with respiratory prob-
lems to venture outside. Even in-
doors, some residents were left
coughing and fighting for breath.
Outside, in some places, residents
said they could not see farther
than 50 yards.
There were some hopeful signs.
The high-speed winds abated and
smoke blocked sunlight, lowering
temperatures to the low 50s, well
below normal. T here is a chance of
rain on Tuesday.
But people were still suffering,
and the forest still burning.
In Michael Warner’s home in
WILDFIRES FROM A
Pacific Northwest smothered by dense smoke
MARIO ANZUONI/REUTERSDAVID RYDER/GETTY IMAGESTOP: A helicopter drops water to help extinguish the Bobcat Fire in Arcadia, Calif., on Sunday. ABOVE: R esidents collect belongings from
homes that were saved by fire retardant in a neighborhood largely destroyed by the flames in Talent, Ore. Oregon officials said that more
than 30 fires w ere still burning across the state Sunday afternoon and that d ozens of people remained missing.