Acres: 20,019 acres | Start Date: July 21, 2024 | Cause: Lightning | Fuels: Timber, Grass, Brush | Containment: 99% | Resources: 100
Highlights: Crews and equipment continue with mop-up and suppression repairs. Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) personnel arrive on incident.
Objectives: Crews continue to grid, remove hazard trees and check for hot spots to ensure mop-standards are met. Heavy equipment and fire personnel continue to repair areas where natural resources were disturbed during fire suppression. A group of Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) specialists arrived on the incident to evaluate the burn severity on the federal lands within the fire. They analyze satellite imagery from before the fire and that of after the fire and map how hot the soil got during the fire. The objective of the BAER program is to determine the need for and to prescribe and implement emergency treatments on Federal Lands to minimize threats to life or property resulting from the effects of a fire or to stabilize and prevent unacceptable degradation to natural and cultural resources. In other words, they can determine how long it will take a burned area to recover.
Weather: A fire weather watch is in effect from Saturday afternoon through Saturday evening for winds and low relative humidity. Relatively quiet conditions expected today, outside of a slight chance for isolated showers and thunderstorms over primarily the Wallowas this afternoon. Saturday looks to be much more active, as an oncoming weather system will bring in robust moisture across the Cascades and hot, dry conditions over southeastern Oregon. A threat of thunderstorms remains across the east slopes and even into the Columbia Basin. This weather system will also pick up on hot and dry desert air, pulling it into southeastern Oregon, where breezy winds will combine with low RHs and an unstable environment to create potentially critical conditions for Grant and Harney Counties in particular. A quieter weather pattern with more seasonally average temperatures is expected after Saturday.
Closures: Driving in or visiting the areas affected by Courtrock Fire is a violation against a Forest Service closure order. Please wait to visit until the closure order is lifted, which means the area has been stabilized.
Evacuations/Shelters/Closures: Level 1 evacuations are in effect for some areas.
- For Grant County evacuation updates, visit the Grant County Emergency Management Office’s Facebook page, or sign up for the Grant County Emergency Alert System.
- The U.S. Forest Service has closures for the Malheur National Forest.
Fire Information:
