Weather and Fire Behavior: Wind speeds up to 40 miles per hour and wet conditions presented challenges for those working on the Riverside Fire Friday. Fire weakens trees, making them more susceptible to falling during high winds. Further, after vegetation is burned from around rocks, they are more likely to shift, particularly when rain moistens soils.
Low clouds and forecast precipitation will limit fire behavior today. Spread rates will be very low. While precipitation over the area since Wednesday has affected fire behavior, there are places within the perimeter that are sheltered by the tree canopy and continue to smolder.
Yesterday: Crews patrolled the fire area, seeking and extinguishing hot spots. Suppression repair work, including constructing waterbars to address potential soil erosion, is ongoing. Good progress is being made working along the Abbott road to secure it as a potential holding line to the north of the fire.
Today’s Activities: Hand crews are connecting segments of dozer line southwest of the fire. Work continues along the 224 road which is the main access to the Timberlake Job Corps and Ripplebrook Guard Station. Firefighters are patrolling the fire perimeter seeking and extinguishing areas where heat is holding in larger downed trees, stumps or root systems. Improving roads to be used as fireline involves thinning vegetation from along the roadsides and, where necessary, widening the area of bare soil. As a result of this work, there can be large accumulations of cut vegetation. Where work is complete, chippers are being utilized to process brush and limbs cut during line construction.
Evacuations: Current evacuation informationis available at www.clackamas.us/wildfires, twitter.com/ClackCoSheriff or by calling 503-655-8224.
Smoke info: Oregon Smoke Blog:oregonsmoke.blogspot.com
Willamette Valley Smoke outlook: wildlandfiresmoke.net/outlooks/nworegon
Closures:
Mt. Hood National Forest www.fs.usda.gov/alerts/mthood/alerts-notices
Bureau of Land Management www.blm.gov/sites/blm.gov/files/orwa-fpo-nwo-092220.pdf
Fire Information: 509-228-7805
Road Closures on TripCheck: www.tripcheck.com/
Inciweb: inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/7174/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/RiversideFireInfo
Twitter: twitter.com/fire_riverside
Youtube: tinyurl.com/RiversideFireInfoVideos
Riverside Fire Information Officer
Email: [email protected]
Riverside Fire Info: inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/7174/
Phone: 509-228-7805 (public)
Facebook: facebook.com/RiversideFireInfo
Twitter: twitter.com/fire_riverside Tags: #RiversideFire #ClackamasWildfires
Real-time evacuation updates at: https://twitter.com/ClackCoSheriff and https://www.clackamas.us/wildfires