Oregon is carrying the heaviest wildfire load in the United States. The National Interagency Coordination Center’s situation report for Monday morning counts 37 large fires burning in the state across 1,317,415 acres — more ground than the land area of Delaware — and records 277,967 of those acres as growth in the previous reporting period alone. Sixty-eight structures have been destroyed. The state’s fires are staffed by 12,417 people.
Four of them are above 100,000 acres, and the largest is the least attended. Big Grass, on Bureau of Land Management ground in the Vale District of south-eastern Oregon, stood at 280,000 acres and 5% containment on Monday after adding 60,000 acres in a day, with 69 personnel assigned. Coleman Creek, at 130,000 acres, was reported at zero containment with 94 people on it. Rangeland fires move fast and threaten little that can be insured, which is why a fire the size of a county can run with the staff of a small restaurant while a smaller fire near houses draws a thousand.
The fire that has drawn the most attention is not the biggest. The Rowe Creek Complex, ten miles south of Fossil in Wheeler County, was started by lightning on 15 July and reached 208,759 acres at 31% containment, with 1,362 personnel, 41 crews and 66 engines assigned and three structures lost. Fire managers expected it to merge with the Brewer fire, itself 51,308 acres and the worst structure loss in the state at 18 buildings destroyed. The Hay Creek Complex, at 181,821 acres, is further along at 60% contained but has lost 11 structures.
The clearest measure of the week is how often Oregon has reached for its emergency statute. The Emergency Conflagration Act lets the state fire marshal mobilise structural firefighters — the crews that protect houses, as distinct from the wildland crews that fight the fire itself — and send them across county lines at state expense. The marshal’s office invoked it on three consecutive days: for the Crosswhite West fire in Crook and Jefferson counties on 24 July, for the Shingle fire in Grant and Wheeler counties on 25 July, and for the Beachcomb and Bench fires and the Second Flat fire on 26 July. Those last two were the ninth and tenth invocations of 2026.
In Baker County the escalation came overnight. The Fox fire, which the federal report had at 7,098 acres on Sunday morning, was at 26,445 acres by Monday’s report after adding 19,347 acres in a day, still at zero containment, with eight structures destroyed. The Baker County Sheriff’s Office and the city moved the whole of Huntington to a Level 3 “Go Now” order at about 9 p.m. on Sunday, sending deputies and search-and-rescue teams door to door and running a bus out of the city hall for residents without transport.
On the Warm Springs Reservation, two fires on Bureau of Indian Affairs land grew at similar speed. The Bench fire went from 6,201 acres to 20,180 in a day and has destroyed nine structures; the Beachcomb fire went from 2,352 to 13,648. Level 3 evacuation orders covered the entirety of Warm Springs and other parts of Jefferson County. Both fires started on 23 July, and neither had any containment on Monday.
The Akawa Butte fire is the state’s expensive one. At 27,222 acres it is a tenth the size of Big Grass, but it carries 1,668 personnel — more than any other fire in Oregon — and $18.9 million in costs to date. Governor Tina Kotek visited the response on 24 July, and her office described it as the nation’s highest-priority wildfire. It has also drawn one of only two federal fire-cost declarations Oregon has received this year.
Nationally the picture is stretched. The country is at Preparedness Level 5, the top of the scale, with 95 uncontained large fires, 128 active incidents covering 2,309,136 acres and 25,796 personnel committed. Of that, the Northwest geographic area — Oregon and Washington — accounts for 54 incidents, 1,556,814 acres and 15,483 people. That is 67.4% of the nation’s active-incident acreage and 60% of everyone assigned to a fire anywhere in the United States, concentrated in two states.
The season as a whole is running above normal but not at a record. Year to date the country has burned 4,185,831 acres, which the report puts at 125% of the ten-year average for this date, on a fire count 127% of average. Two MAFFS C-130 air tankers from the Air Force Reserve have been sent to Klamath Falls, and a fourth firefighter death of the season was announced on 24 July — a US Wildland Fire Service firefighter injured on the Knowles fire in Colorado a month earlier.
The federal money tells a different story from the acreage. Oregon has received two Fire Management Assistance declarations this year, which reimburse a state for fighting a fire that threatens to destroy enough property to qualify: one for the Lower Dry Creek fire on 16 July, one for Akawa Butte on 23 July. By the same date in 2024 it had seven, and in 2025 five. Nationally there have been 33 such declarations this year, against 56 by this date in 2025, 38 in 2024, and an average of about 18 a year over the decade to 2023. This year is heavy by historical standards and light against the last two — and in Oregon it is light against both, even as the state runs its own statute into double figures.
This is the third fire story in nine days in which the numbers describing a fire have outrun the numbers describing the response. On 19 July we reported Minnesota’s worst recorded air quality as fires burned in the Boundary Waters, and Canadian smoke crossing the border while Public Safety Canada described a 1.4-million-hectare season as still below its five-year average. Two days ago we reported France setting a national burn record. Oregon’s active incidents alone cover about 533,000 hectares.
Containment estimates offer little comfort. The Rowe Creek Complex and Coleman Creek are both projected to be contained on 1 October; Big Grass is estimated at 8 August at 5% contained. Red Flag warnings remained in effect across the inland Northwest on Monday, with westerly winds gusting to 35 mph and humidity as low as 5%.