By: Jason Rogers –

At 4:00 P.M. on Sept. 2nd, 2017, a fire was reported in the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon.  By the morning of Sept. 3rd, the wildfire had spread across 3,000 acres.  But that wasn’t even the worst of it; on the morning of Sept. 6th, the Eagle Creek Fire merged with the nearby Indian Creek Fire.  At this point, it was estimated that over 31,000 acres were burning.

However, it’s not as catastrophic as one may think.  

“The gorge still looks like the gorge,” said Lt. Damon Simmons, a spokesman for the Oregon State Fire Marshal.  “It’s not a wasteland.  It’s not a blackened, destroyed no man’s land.  There are trees everywhere and they look good.”  Since he said that, 35,588 acres have been burned in total.  Winds have died down and precipitation has occurred, which has for the most part extinguished the fires.  Still, 31,000 acres burned in four days is not a number to take lightly.

On Sept. 5th, the Oregon State Police announced that they had a person who they suspected started the dangerous wildfire.  The suspect was a fifteen-year-old boy from Vancouver, Washington, who was using fireworks that were illegally set off.  An eyewitness reported that they saw a group of teenagers recording the fireworks being set off and thrown into Eagle Creek Canyon.

LSE junior Maddie Elbracht has family that lives in Pullman, Washington, near the path of the wildfires.  “My uncle, and two of my cousins [live there],” she said.  She also said that she’s been talking to them more because of the wildfires happening near them.  “They’ve been posting pictures of the fires.  They’re devastated.”  

Elbracht also had some words of advice for the perpetrators.  “Just think before you act,” she said.  “A lot of teenagers act on impulse.  If we put thought into things, we could prevent a lot of mistakes.”