Oregon Department of Forestry sends firefighters to aid North Carolina in wildfire fight
Ten of the 26 Oregon firefighters deployed this weekend to assist with wildfires in North Carolina are from the Northwest Oregon Area, headquartered in Forest Grove.
Wednesday update: The Oregon Department of Forestry will send an additional 11 firefighters to North Carolina, including two out of the local Forest Grove District offices. They leave Thursday morning.
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The Oregon Department of Forestry dispatched a crew of 26 Oregon firefighters and two agency representatives to North Carolina to aid the state's battle against several wildfires.
Sent over the weekend, many crew members arrived in North Carolina on Sunday, and were assigned to fight the Black Cove incident in the western part of the state.
"We sent firefighters from all across Oregon," said Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) spokesperson Jessica Neujahr in an email to this newspaper.
The Northwest Oregon area, headquartered in Forest Grove off Gales Creek Road, sent 10 firefighters. Nine came from the Southern Oregon Area, eight from the Eastern Oregon Area, and one came from Salem.
Expected to remain there for two weeks, the crews are a returned favor from last year, when Oregon's 2024 wildfire season saw the arrival of "almost a whole incident management team along with several overhead positions" from North Carolina, an ODF press release noted.
“Being able to have an additional incident management team (IMT) made it so we did not have to make the hard choice of prioritizing one fire over another,” said Blake Ellis, ODF Fire Operations Manager. “At the time, we had two fires in need of an IMT and only one ODF team available. We were able to fill both incidents’ needs due to the extra support from our North Carolina partners.”
Oregon and North Carolina have a mutual assistance agreement, like many other states. When Oregon wildfire activity is low, the state can send crews to aid other parts of the country and even Canada.
In 2024, Oregon saw such assistance from about 21 states, provinces, and territories, ODF said.
“These agreements help bolster the complete and coordinated fire protection system and create a cache of reciprocal resources for all of us to call on when needed,” Michael Curran, ODF’s Fire Protection Division Chief, said.
“Know that we don’t share these resources without appropriate vetting. Before committing to any out-of-state deployment, we make sure that our own fire management system is still adequately staffed and ready to respond to fires here in Oregon. Serving Oregonians is our first and primary priority,” said Curran.
