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Commissioner: fires struck urban and suburban neighborhoods — a pattern not seen locally in more than a century
Summary
Josh Kearns said what made this event unusually destructive was that it impacted urban and suburban neighborhoods — homes on quarter-acre lots with sidewalks — rather than primarily rural areas, a pattern he said the region had not seen in roughly 135 years.
Commissioner Josh Kearns said the striking aspect of these wildfires is their impact on urban and suburban neighborhoods rather than the rural settings typical of earlier large fires in the county.
"What was really, a a new thing for for this region that we haven't seen in over 135 years, is that this was such an urban area that, that that saw the devastation of these fires," Kearns said. He contrasted the current damage with previous large local blazes on Grays Road and Oregon Road that mostly affected rural areas.
Kearns described neighborhoods with paved streets, sidewalks and small quarter-acre lots being devastated, which he said contributed to the scale of home loss and community disruption.
