The lightning caused North Pelican Fire remains at approximately 1,100 acres. We are now at 2% containment. Fire growth has been predominately along the southern and eastern perimeters. Yesterday crews and equipment made good progress building dozer lines along the eastern perimeter of the fire between Westside Road and the fire’s eastern edge. They are also cleaning up around very large areas of downed timber called Landing Piles that were created by logging activity in the area.
Today, winds will be one of the main safety considerations for fire personnel. Winds will be shifting throughout the day, coming from the NE this morning, switching to SE winds before noon, then from the SW after 12:00 and switching again this afternoon to NNW winds and finally late today from the WNW. In addition, due to the solar eclipse, firefighters will be working in partial darkness for a couple of hours this morning, obviously an unusual situation. The main objectives are still to keep an anchor point at the FS350 road and continue establishing control lines. Mop up efforts around spot fires and landing piles should begin today. Crews will mop up ten-feet into the fire’s perimeter and will go further once hazard trees are mitigated. Hazard or snag trees are proving to be another primary safety consideration on this fire. Mop up efforts will further secure the containment lines and reduce the potential for the fire to spread.
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| Crews on the North Pelican Fire have been wetting down "Landing Piles". Landing piles are the piling of 'slash' on a logging operations site, resulting in a large slash/timber pile. Slash is debris and forest litter that is low-lying, dying and/or dead, and woody material left over from a logging operation. |
The Pelican Butte Road closure (#06-02-13-17-05) is now in effect. The closure is for Forest Road 3651-980 (Pelican Butte Road) in its entirety, from the junction with Forest Road 3651. The road has been signed and barricaded. This is for safety reasons, to keep solar eclipse viewers and any other non-emergency traffic from the area. The Forest Service is anticipating a larger area wide closure of the area in and surrounding the fire later this afternoon. If traveling on Westside Road or through the Rocky Point area, please be vigilant and drive with caution as emergency traffic vehicles are plentiful in the area. When smoke is visible, motorists are encouraged to drive with their headlights on. Please use extreme caution when driving near firefighters and equipment.
An online option for viewing the fire area is https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/publicmaps/keno/map.html. Winds from the north continued to push smoke into the Basin today. Air quality advisories are available at www.klamathair.org.
A valued online resource accessible to the public is an interactive (Wildland Urban Interface) WUI map available at http://www.kcrsg.org/. You can plug in your address and see what your exposure is and learn more about what WUI means to you.
South Central Oregon Fire Management Partnership is an interagency fire management program that provides comprehensive wildland fire service to south central Oregon and northwest Nevada. The partnership strives to achieve a more efficient, effective and integrated interagency fire management program for all participating agencies on the land administered and protected by each agency.
Participating agencies include: Fremont-Winema National Forest, Lakeview District BLM (Bureau of Land Management), Sheldon-Hart Mountain National Wildlife Refuge Complex, Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge Complex, Crater Lake National Park and Klamath-Lake District ODF (Oregon Department of Forestry).
For more information, contact the North Pelican Fire Information line for the South Central Oregon Fire Management Partnership at 541-363-7412 or scofmp.fire.info@gmail.com.
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