MERLIN, Ore.– Around seven major fires are burning in southern Oregon, ranging from a couple thousand acres to tens of thousands of acres. While crews continue to work night and day across vast path of forests and wilderness, it’s sometimes hard to comprehend how large these fires are.
For starters, if you were take all of the fires across southern Oregon, currently, and put them together, it would cover nearly 85,000 acres. To put that in perspective, all these fires are about the same size as 64,393 football fields.
The largest of the batch is the Taylor Creek Fire just west of Grants Pass. So far, it has burned nearly 30,000 acres and is about 30 percent contained.
“We’ve been guardedly optimistic since I got here about 12 days ago,” said Andy Lyon, public information officer. “The fire has continued to progress, we continue to build line, strengthen that line.”
To give some idea of how large this fire is, Medford – which covers some 16,000 acres – is about half the size. Grants Pass is about a quarter the size.
“So the fires been growing but we’ve been able to mostly stay ahead of it,” said Lyon. “It jumps our lines we get a new line around it. We keep working.”
It’s a similar story for fire crews on other fires around the region. While the Sugar Pine and Klondike fires are smaller than Taylor Creek, the terrain has made them difficult to contain.
Compared to the Carr Fire raging near Redding or the massive 500,000 acre Biscuit Fire in 2002, the Taylor Creek Fire is still relatively small.
“You see that big red blob on the map, doesn’t mean all of that is burning or all of it has burned,” said Lyon. “Some of it has burned severely, some of it has not.”
It’s important to note that while giving a perspective on the size of fires, there is a caveat.
“Doesn’t matter what size, you just want us to get it under control so things can get back to normal,” said Lyon. “We have a whole bunch of dedicated people out there 24/7 trying to do that.”
While the Taylor Creek Fire is the largest we’ve seen this year it is by no means the largest we’ve seen in the past decade. But firefighters say it’s still dangerous, if not more so, due to the terrain that it is in.
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