Elijah and Xiomara Roy were at their grandparents’ house north of Sisters, about to drop the final antacid tablet into their fizzy homemade lava lamps, when they were told it was time to go.
“My grandma — we call her mi-ma — said it was time to go,” Elijah said. “I was asking what was going on, asking if it was a Level 3, and she said yes.”
He was referring to the Level 3 — Go Now wildfire evacuations from the 26,000-acre Akawa Butte fire burning north of Sisters. Roiled by heat and wind, the flames charged within 5 miles of Sisters Wednesday afternoon, forcing hundreds of evacuations as the blaze ballooned into the top priority wildfire across the Pacific Northwest.
Elijah and Xiomara, who are 10 and 6, spent Wednesday night with their family at the Red Cross’ temporary evacuation shelter at Sisters High School.
“Once we arrived here, I was still scared,” he said.
He is not the only one. Sisters is on edge as wildfire knocks on the community’s back door for the second consecutive summer. That’s one of several large wildfires engulfing a Central Oregon’s landscape parched from historically low rain and snowfall.
Luckily, firefighters got a break following the Wednesday afternoon thunderstorm that agitated the blaze. The wind calmed and rain fell as fire crews settled in for dinner around 8 p.m. Wednesday at camp on the Sisters Rodeo Grounds.
“We’ve been handed a gift, and we need to take advantage of this break in the weather,” Incident Commander Greg Pettinger said as the night shift took over.
A window of fair weather to control the blaze was expected to last nearly three days, Whitney Tayer, public information officer with the Oregon Department of Forestry, told the Source Thursday morning. She said crews made good progress overnight.
“Before Saturday, our objective is to build a solid, continuous line around the fire,” Tayer said.
Tayer said the wind is forecasted to shift and blow the blaze east, rather than directly south toward Sisters.
On Wednesday, the fire was too much for crews to handle.
Flames reportedly 150 to 200 feet long lapped up “critically dry fuels” amid what official reports called “extreme fire behavior.” As a massive thunderstorm rolled in and dropped lightning and rain across the state. The fire near Sisters grew so hot it formed its own weather system — a puffy pyro cumulus collected over the blaze and sent down lightning of its own, Tayer said. The cloud, paired with choking smoke, made it impossible for planes and helicopters to get near the fire, Tayer said.
Crews also reported fire tornado activity, Tayer said.
The Akawa Butte fire has drawn parallels to last year’s Flat Fire, a 20,000-acre blaze that began in rural Jefferson County and burned four homes while racing south and short of Sisters.
But “this fire has been much angrier,” said Sisters Mayor Jennifer Letz, a former wildland firefighter.
It’s also about a month earlier in the season than last year’s scare. Oregon’s relatively mild fire year turned on a dime earlier this month when thunderstorms dropped lightning that ignited hundreds of thousands of acres and strapping the state’s firefighting crews.
“Resources are really stretched thin,” Letz said. “It’s been a slow roll to really get adequate resources. However, there are times when mother nature is absolutely in charge. You can anchor and flank, you can try to do point protection around structures or values at risk, but there’s a lot of times when you’re going to have to get out of the way. Whether you have 100 people or 1,000 people, it doesn’t make a difference.”
Luckily for Sisters, national fire officials deemed the escalating Akawa Fire as the top firefighting priority for the Pacific Northwest region. Nearly 1,000 people have descended on Sisters to fight the blaze, including crews from California, Nevada, Idaho and across Oregon.
A few local firefighters had to leave the front lines to evacuate their own homes, Tayer said.
The number of Deschutes County properties under immediate evacuation order jumped from a few dozen to about 760, according to Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office Spokesperson Jason Carr. Another 3,700 properties were told to prepare to leave under a “Level 1 — Ready notice,” including the northern half of Sisters city proper.
At a gas station on the west side of town on Thursday afternoon, attendant Amanda Goodwin hustled to help a customer fill an extra gas can on their way out of town. The day before, she evacuated from the public forest land west of Sisters, where she lives in an RV. Forest Service officials notified her after she got back from her shift. She scrambled to jump the vehicle’s dead battery and drive to Sisters High School with her three young children. She kept a close eye on her phone, tracking the evacuation levels as the temporary shelter moved into a “Level 1 — Ready” notice.
“I’m hoping it dumps a bunch of rain and pushes it back,” Goodwin said.
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