Deschutes National Forest, Prineville BLM lift remaining Darlene 3 Fire area closures, but caution urged

(Update: Darlene 3 Fire area closures lifted)

LA PINE, Ore. (KTVZ)-- Fire season is in full force, as several large blazes over the past two weeks have shown. But regular, ongoing efforts by the Bureau of Land Management's Prineville District and others to thin and reduce potential fuels have helped prevent much more damage from occurring.

Another sign of progress came Friday, 2 1/2 weeks after the fire began, when the Deschutes National Forest and Prineville District of the BLM lifted their remaining emergency closures in the area.

Firefighters are continuing daily patrols of the fire, extinguishing any areas of interior isolated smoldering and smoking stumps as they identify them.

The agencies said, "Please use caution when recreating in areas that were impacted. A burned landscape represents a number of safety hazards that either did not exist prior to the fire or were exacerbated by the effects of the fire."

As of Wednesday, Central Oregon has seen 105 human-caused fires thave have burned 6,765 acres - and just 1 lightning-sparked fire that burned .10 of an acre.

"Do your part," officials say, by following industrial fire precautions and public-use fire restrictions; don't park or drive on dry vegetation; secure tow chains; and properly discard of smoking materials.

The BLM recently said in a news release, "Decades of extensive fuel treatments in the area performed by the BLM Prineville District Division of Fire and Aviation Management and partners, as well as a rapid response from local fire teams, prevented the fire from reaching the town" of La Pine.

The BLM has been thinning and burning the area outside of La Pine since 2021 to mimic natural wildfires that occurred before the area was populated.

"If you go and look at where these fuel treatments were, you'll see a low mortality rate of the trees. Whereas, in the places where the fuels had not been pretreated, you'll see a high mortality rate," said Amanda Roberts, the BLM's Prineville District manager.

Two weeks ago, the Darlene 3 Fire sparked just a few miles east of the city of La Pine and reached 3,000 acres in two days. On the first day, the Forest Service described prescribed burns as an insurance policy.

"Once fires have been hitting those prescribed fire unit, it knocks it down out of the canopy, out of the crown, like the needles of the tree down on the ground, where we can do hand-to-hand combat with it," PIO Kassidy Kern said the day the blaze started.

Two weeks later, roadblocks are still up on Reed Road and on Finley Butte Road, as crews continue to investigate and clean up the areas where the Darlene 3 Fire burned. The area is expected to open back up on Friday.

Fire management team member James Osborne said, "We'll probably see some sort of salvage and repair work that occurs through our actual ecological-based staff, to do what's right to get that area into a state of repair that allows it for regeneration."

Currently, 3.6 million acres are burned in the state annually.

"This is an example of where fuel treatments speak for themselves on the effectiveness in preventing catastrophic wildfires in the future," Roberts said.

In May, Senator Ron Wyden introduced the National Prescribed Burning Act of 2024, which would authorize $300 million for the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior to plan more prescribed burning and increase the number of acres burned.