History Spotlight, 8/14

The first of the Tillamook Burn series of forest fires started on this day in 1933 in Oregon's Northern Coast Range.   Between 1933 and 1951, this series of fires would burn more than 350,000 acres of old growth forest.

It was all actually an accident.  A steel cable pulling a downed tree dragged against the dry bark of another tree. Friction did its work and the fire started.  It wouldn't be extinguished until the fall rains came in September.  Ships as far as 500 miles at sea could smell smoke from the fire.  Total estimated loss of wood was estimated to be 8.5 billion dollars (in current terms).

A combination of low humidity and dry, blustery conditions led to the fire spreading at an unheard of rate.  At its fastest, it was burning at a rate of 21 square miles an hour along a 15 mile front.

After the last of the fires a determined effort was made to reforest the region.  Because paper and lumber companies can't pay taxes on land that doesn't have any trees on it, much of the land had fallen into the hands on the local governments because of  foreclosure sales.  Everyone from schoolchildren to prisoners to specially-designed helicopters planted over a millions trees.  This was only a fraction of the estimated 72 million trees that had been lost but still, a quality effort.  In 1973, the Oregon governor Tom McCall dedicated the Tillamook Burn as the Tillamook State Forest.

The current controversy is that, now that those trees are reaching maturity, should they be harvested.  Every one in the 40's thought that was the plan, but people these days aren't so sure.

In his book "Northwest Corner: Oregon and Washington" author Stuart Holbrook said:

[Reforestation] can never compensate for that tragedy we call the Tillamook Burn, as somber a sight as to be viewed this side of the Styx. There they stand, millions of ghostly firs, now stark against the sky, which were green as the sea and twice as handsome, until an August day of 1933, when a tiny spark blew into a hurricane of fire that removed all life from 300,000 acres (1,200 km2) of the finest timber even seen. It was timber, too, that had been 400 years in the making. It was wiped out in a few seething hours which Oregon will have reason to remember well past the year 2000. To this day the forest stands powerless against the threat of wildfires.