Oregon wildfires: Half a million people flee dozens of infernos | Hacker News Reader

Oregon wildfires: Half a million people flee dozens of infernos

bbc.com

37 pointsReedx14 comments

We are about 5 miles from an evacuation area, one of my wife's co-workers and several of her acquaintances have lost their homes. Fortunately the weather seems to have mellowed.

Frustrating that this seems off the national radar completely.

It's on the radar, just not like you'd hope. Oregon police have begged people to stop calling in arson reports based on fake news conspiracies...

Stay safe!!!

There is an article on Phoenix, Oregon, in the left column below the fold on page A1 of today's Washington Post.

Today's New York Times has an article on page A1 at the top of the fifth column (of six) filed from Molalla, Oregon.

I don't think this is off the national radar.

Agree, it's the top story on my news feed here in the midwest.

It's probably going to get somewhat diminished coverage, as by Monday it's highly likely that there will be 4 named storms in the Atlantic, with a large hurricane forecast to hit Bermuda and another bearing down on Texas or Lousiana by the end of the week.

We’re at our farm in Northwest Oregon and it’s been a surreal few days with fires in nearly every direction — but luckily not on top of us. There has been untold devastation not very farm from here. The air quality has been oppressively bad — no sun for days, and two days of the strange orange glow.

Communications during the firestorms has been lacking, especially compared with our experience in the Bay Area. I’ve had to rely on random twitter accounts, and local newspapers from outside our county to cobble together info on whether the fires were approaching us or not on a given night. Part of that is the nature of the event — lots of fires, and rapidly changing conditions, and overstretched resources. But a lesson from this is that rural Oregon sorely needs a strategy for clear comms during these firestorms. Local stories are bubbling up about people not getting evacuation orders, or getting contradictory information.

Another part of this is infrastructure — no fiber or even DSL in a lot of these locations. Cell towers were up and down. Satellite internet was flaky. Grateful for our landline.

The smoke hasn’t cleared yet, and massive fires are still going, but the weather is looking more favorable. Today was cooler and more humid and rain is expected by Monday evening.

But when the smoke does clear, I’m afraid this will indeed be a great tragedy.

Stay safe everyone.

>> The wildfires have also prompted mass evacuations in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon's largest city.

Does anyone know which suburb of Portland is being evacuated? It is mentioned in the article, but when I look at a state map of evacuations [1] it doesn't show any suburbs in the "go" section (ordered to evacuate). Oregon City is in the "be set" evacuation zone, so maybe they are considering that to be a suburb or Portland and are saying that it is evacuating when they aren't ordered to yet?

I don't currently live in the area, but most of my family and friends do (most live in the evacuated areas). It is hard to find clear information sometimes. The best resources I have found are the facebook or twitter feeds of the 911, sheriff, or county fire departments.

[1] https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/6329d5e4e13748b9b9f...

I live in Portland, and Estacada and Molalla were evacuated. Oregon City is currently on level 2 warning. Level 3 is immediate evacuation. Mostly it's places in Clackamas Couny. Here's the most up to date info you're probably going to find. It's from Oregon Emergency Operations. https://www.oregon.gov/oem/emops/Pages/RAPTOR.aspx . Here's a list of resources that was put up by the office of one of the Oregon state reps https://bonamici.house.gov/media/media/statements/wildfire-r... . I found the Raptor link there.

Oregon only has a little over 4 million people; half a million evacuated means 10% of the state is out of their homes. Even if only a small proportion of them actually burn we're looking at a serious housing crisis.

The governor just said that number was inaccurate. Here's a link to the coverage of the press conference. https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2020/09/with-oregonians-... .

Basically the 500,000 people was all the people in any sort of evacuation preparation zone. That includes everyone in a level 1 evacuation zone. That's the be ready level. There have been less than 100,000 people actually evacuated in a level 3 zone according to the press conference. That's still a lot of people, but not as many as had been reported. It's still horrific for everyone that's been displaced.

Slowly but surely the blind masses are waking up to the fragility of our modern infrastructure, as well as the terrible idea of millions upon millions of people living in small concentrated areas.

If you haven't seen the writing on the wall yet, MOVE out of the cities and heavy population areas. You will be glad you did.

How does moving out of high population areas help with wildfires?

But, one of the reasons for the fires is that due to lack of housing in cities, populations have been pushed more and more into wilderness areas, preventing proper forest management and exposing themselves to greater risks of fires.

Not to mention the second order effects of less density: more driving, more C02, more warming... more fires.

Fires on the west coast are especially damaging to homes built in rural areas. It's the people living outside of heavy population areas being hit hardest right now.

These fires are not in the cities, these are forest fires that are burning small rural towns.

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