Oregon’s wildfires haven’t gotten their due this year.
They’ve made some headlines and generated some discussion, but they deserve more. The condition of Oregon may depend on their getting it.
By some measures, Oregon has been the number one state this year for wildfires. While fire season won’t be over for another month or so, Oregon is likely to rank high for 2026.
As of Sept. 8, the National Interagency Fire Center reported nine active wildfires in Oregon, more than any state but Washington, covering 1.1 million acres so far, with at least two of enormous size, the Big Grass fire near Jordan Valley (578,637 acres) and the Rowe Creek Complex near Fossil (337,927 acres).
The overall state numbers are down in September. In late August KOIN-TV in Portland counted 18 fires underway burning 1.3 million acres. Those acreage counts are enormous in absolute terms: Oregon in total has 61 million acres.
A Legislative Fiscal Office report out this month noted “The start of Oregon’s 2026 wildfire season was both early and aggressive, driven by record-low snowpack, record-high temperatures, and early-season drought conditions. The unseasonably dry landscape in March and April led to dozens of early-season fires. … On July 22, 2026, Oregon’s landscape was reportedly inundated by 8,357 dry lightning strikes statewide, sparking at least eight new fires, including the Grasshopper Fire near Mount Hood. By late July, more than 150 wildfires were burning across the state.”
All this was projected at a relatively early point. Governor Tina Kotek in June issued a statewide fire emergency, which set directives for how agencies and responders would cooperate.
These wildfires have been expensive, and are blowing well past previous records. They have been costly to fight (an analysis by KOIN-TV estimated a grand total figure at $842 million). The Fiscal Office report figured on a state level “gross large fire costs totaling $236.2 million and net fire costs totaling $157.4 million. For comparative purposes, this exceeds the fire season costs incurred as of August 20, 2024, by $30.2 million gross and $95.1 million net.
Beyond that, of course, they have damaged significant amounts of land and property.
And they have been responsible for a range of secondary costs. One of the biggest: The cost of electric power, rising in part due to actual and preventative costs of wildfires.
And yet in much of Oregon, the fires seem a little off to the side, peripheral. Most people in Oregon live west or south of the Cascade Mountains, and nearly all of the large fires are well to the east of those mountains.
Many of the more populous parts of Oregon have had mellow summer weather this year — moderate temperatures in much of Oregon, few very-hot days — compared to much of the country. This hasn’t felt so much like fire season in the Willamette Valley.
Too, most of those parts of Oregon also caught only occasional smoke this year. Orange suns showed up from time to time, but outside the actual and more remote burn areas, they didn’t persist for more than a few days at a time.
One good-news aspect of the lower attention may be that — to judge from a range of on-scene reports — wildfire fighters seem to have been uncommonly effective this year.
But still another reason is where the fires were located. For most Oregonians, they were somewhere over there, far away and over mountain ranges from heavily populated areas.
For all that, in some ways Oregon dodged a fire bullet this year in terms of impact on large numbers of people and stocks of property.
But that’s this year. With just a little more than half a year till the start of the next fire season, which quite possibly could be worse, time has come for more intensive planning.
Oregon — and most of the West — has had ongoing small snowpacks. This year, the National Weather Service is projecting something like more of the same, a warm and relatively dry winter, which sounds like not a lot of mountain snow. Next year’s fire season may be a more unavoidable reality than this one.
We have the larger share of a year to prepare for what may be a rough fire season in 2027. We should use it wisely.
This column originally appeared in the Oregon Capital Chronicle.
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