When flames were spotted within one of the world’s tallest trees, firefighters flooded the area.
Drones, aircraft and hand crews worked for days to tame the fire, successfully stopping it from spreading across the dense forest that surrounds the famous Doerner Fir tree in Oregon’s Coast Range mountains.
But the towering Coast Douglas-fir has remained stubbornly alight.
And firefighters — at least at the moment — seem stumped.
“There’s still this spot where water is just not quite reaching yet,” said Megan Harper, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Land Management in Oregon. “Partway down the tree there’s an area that’s burning a cavity into the side. … That is the area that is now still hot.”
The bizarre single-tree fire has now become an almost weeklong firefight in Coos County, Ore., as the hot spot continues to burn approximately 280 feet up on the side of the arboreal giant.
“We have different conversations [going on] in the background with arborist experts, who may be able to help get the rest of the fire out,” Harper said. “How do you get water into a hot spot from the side?”
She said crews are stationed around the tree and will remain so until the fire is out. The fire initially broke out Saturday around 2 p.m.
“We’ve been able to use helicopters with buckets … that’s been very successful getting the top of the tree,” she said. The still-smoking side cavity has proven more difficult.
Harper said the blaze’s initial charge felled an estimated 50-foot chunk from the top of the tree, which consistently had ranked among the world’s tallest. Before the fire, it was often listed as the second-tallest tree in the U.S., trailing only Hyperion, a gargantuan 380-foot Coast redwood located in Redwood National and State Parks.
“Prefire [Doerner] was 325 feet tall and about 11.5 feet in diameter, so it’s a large, tall tree,” Harper said. “We’re not sure exactly how much height is lost.”
Depending what happens in the next few days, “more height could be lost,“ she said.
Harper said the cause of the fire remains under investigation. Initially, officials thought lightning was a likely culprit, but weather data have ruled that out, Harper said.
“I think everyone would be super disheartened to learn that maybe it would be human-caused,” Harper said, confirming that there is a remote trail that provides hikers access to the tree. But she said their team is not making any assumptions while the investigation continues.
“Fire in the Oregon Coast Range is actually pretty rare … so the fact that it even happened and then it happened to be this tree — it was a very unique situation,” Harper said.
BLM land around the Doerner Fir fire in Coquille, Ore., remains closed while firefighting continues.
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