OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK — Cooler temperatures and higher humidity slowed the growth of the Paradise Fire in the Queets River valley to about 150 new acres, the National Park Service firefighting team announced Wednesday morning.
The blaze is now estimated to be 949 acres in size and moving upward on steep slopes.
Fire growth in the Queets drainage is expected to continue today under similar weather conditions.
Crews are monitoring its movement and taking suppression actions when safe.
The objective of keeping the fire east of Bob Creek and north of the Queets River is being met and is expected to continue.
The Pacific Northwest National Incident Management Organization, under the command of Bill Hahnenberg, will meet with the current management team today and shadow them throughout the day.
The national team is expected to take responsibility for the Paradise Fire on Thursday morning.
There are currently 66 people assigned to the fire, including the leadership team, 2 crews, 2 helicopters, 1 water tender and support personnel.
Temperatures are expected to increase as the week progresses and lightning is in the forecast for this weekend.
A public fire information meeting will be held at 6 p.m. tonight at the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Ranger District office, at 353 South Shore Road in Quinault.
Fire managers will provide an overview of the fire’s activity to date, discuss the long-term outlook, and share photos and videos of the fire area.
It is the third community meeting. Meetings were held in Port Angeles on Monday and Forks on Tuesday.
Our earlier report . . .
By Arwyn Rice
Peninsula Daily News
OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK — As of Tuesday afternoon, the lightning-triggered fire burning in Queets rain forest, known as the Paradise Fire, had scorched about 800 acres and was expected to grow, with a prediction that it could burn for four months.
The Jefferson County fire, confirmed by aerial surveillance June 15, is inside Olympic National Park on the floodplain and hillsides north of the Queets River valley near Paradise Creek, 13 miles northeast of Quinault.
It is burning in old-growth rain forest, with high canopies covered in rapidly drying lichen and moss and thick duff.
“It’s unprecedented. This area only burns every 300 to 500 years, or even every 1,000 years,” said Todd Rankin, the park’s fire management officer.
The fire could burn in the valley for as long as four months before autumn rains entirely extinguish the flames, he said.
It is not threatening any structures. As of Tuesday afternoon, it was 28 miles from Queets and 33 miles from Forks, and headed up into the mountains, away from habitation.
The forecast for fire conditions was grim. Daytime temperatures are expected to soar and more lightning storms are predicted — a worse-case scenario, according to the National Weather Service forecast.
A heat wave with temperatures in the 80s and possibly into the 90s will begin Thursday and peak Saturday, said Ted Buehner, forecaster and fire-weather specialist at the weather service Seattle office.
Saturday and into Sunday a “southerly flow aloft” will trigger the formation of thunderstorms, which will produce little or no rain, but will likely include new lightning strikes, Buehner said.
There will be little relief from the heat until at least the Fourth of July, when the fire risk increases with the triple threat of heat, fireworks, and outdoor activities that often include the use of fire, he said.
The forecast is exactly what the Park Service doesn’t need, Rankin told a group of about 12 members of the public who attended a fire information meeting in Port Angeles on Monday night.
“If we have a thunderstorm set up over this fire, it could jeopardize the west side,” Rankin said at the meeting.
New lighting strikes also could start new fires that could divide the firefighting force, reducing the number of firefighters available for the Paradise Fire, he said.
The number of people assigned to the fire reached 67 on Tuesday, including two firefighting crews and two helicopters.
Additional crews will be ordered as the needed.
Rankin announced that the National Incident Management Organization team assigned to take over the fire is scheduled to arrive Wednesday to begin transitioning into a new management team for the fire.
The transition will allow local fire managers to focus on potential new fires during the long fire season.
Firefighters are working in a dangerous area with steep valley walls and heavily vegetation in the Queets Rainforest, deep inside the park’s boundaries, officials said.
The fire has been moving northeast with the afternoon winds, which primarily have pushed the fire deeper into the Queets River valley, Rankin said.
If it remains in the valley, it will be trapped by natural barriers, including creeks and rocky cliffs located on the ridges of the valley, where it will burn itself out or be extinguished by the next rain season, he said.
Rankin said firefighters’ primary mission will be to keep the fire from moving south across the Queets River or west of Bob Creek.
He said firefighters are working to use the creek’s natural barriers to keep the fire from moving into the lowlands and into other river drainages, where he said, “it has the potential to get very, very large.”
“We have a high probability of success [in keeping the fire trapped in the valley) if we keep it from moving west,” he said.
The fire team is also concerned that additional fires expected to erupt throughput the western United States will reduce the number of firefighters available to keep the Paradise Fire contained.
Rankin asked that the public become extremely careful to avoid preventable fires due to lit cigarettes being discarded from car windows, fireworks, barbecues, and other sources of fire and heat.
Habits like tossing a lit cigarette that are not usually a problem on the typically moist Olympic Peninsula could cause “nuisance fires” or worse, that would draw firefighters away from the unavoidable lightning and other naturally-caused fires, he said.
Rankin said the “lighting tree” that was struck around May 17 to start the fire was located by firefighters, and said the evidence there shows the fire “incubated” in deep duff, where it can survive for months without showing smoke or heat.
He said the fire smoldered for nearly a month before it emerged, and the park received multiple calls on June 14 reporting smoke plumes, including reports from airliners flying over the park and West End residents.
When the fire was located by a pilot flying through the valley it had already scorched 300 acres.
Typically when fires in the park are located they are between a tenth of an acre and a quarter acre in size, and rarely grow much beyond that size, Rankin said.
However, the record dry conditions have allowed the fire to grow faster than usual, he said.
The fire is burning in the treetops, 70 feet above the forest floor, and burned dry lichen, which then drops burning tinders into the deep duff below, he said.
Firefighters have reported the behavior of the flames is unusual, in that it is burning in the canopies — torching — but is not consuming the trees.
“The needles are scorched but not consumed,” Rankin said.
May and the first half of June have been the driest ever recorded in Forks-area weather records that go back to 1895, and the Olympic Mountain range snowpack was almost nonexistent.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arice@peninsuladailynews.com.
