A massive woodchip/sawdust pile is burning at 31310 Roxbury Road near the Two Rivers Correctional Center.
Jimmy Davis, Umatilla County Fire District No. 1 operations chief, said the pile is approximately 80 to 100 feet tall. The pile looked to be about as wide and approximately 600 feet long.
“Chip pile, sawdust pile, I’m not exactly sure. I haven’t gotten close enough over there to know exactly what’s burning, but I think it’s some kind of chip pile, and it’s a huge pile,” Davis said.
He said heavy equipment loaders were moving the wood byproducts into a separate pile to minimize what will burn.
“What we are doing right now is obviously we don’t have enough water in the world to try and put that out, so they’ve moved back about 50 feet to 100 feet of where the last smoke is, and they’re trying to cut a path through it to separate the two piles and try and save some of what’s there,” Davis said. “Otherwise, it’s just going to keep working itself down through that pile and take the whole thing out.”
He said the cause of the fire was unknown and that the Umatilla Rural Protection District responded to the fire shortly after 1 p.m. The UCFD1 was called at 1:16 p.m, he added. Other fire departments called to the scene were from Echo, Boardman, Pendleton and Irrigon, as well as multiple Bureau of Indian Affairs resources from Mission. He said a 20-man prison crew from the correctional center also helped extinguish a grass fire that jumped Beach Access Road onto TRCI property.
“The fire that jumped the road from the original pile and got into the prison’s property and around to the north has been stopped,” Davis said. “At this point, we are just making sure there are no embers or it doesn’t continue any westward movement. I’ve got a couple of patrol groups along with a hand crew further to the east just to make sure that if anything pops up we try and catch it before it becomes a big problem.”
He said with the grass fire extinguished, the fire was contained to the wood pile.
“I mean at this point this thing is going to burn in that (pile) for what I would project days to weeks,” Davis said. “I mean it’s a big, big pile and it’s not going to go very fast.”
Davis said spraying water on the fire would slow it but not extinguish it. “That pile is so big, we don’t have any resources to put water that high, at this point,” he said.
Davis said he was unaware of the wood pile’s owner other than it belonged to a company with the acronym PCA. A search of the address in the county tax records yielded no results.
Davis said no injuries occurred but several vehicles were trapped near the McNary Beach Recreation Area until county sheriff’s deputies were able to reroute them to safety. He added there was no property damage other than the wood pile.
Davis said the prison’s heating, ventilation and air condition system had to be shut down to prevent smoke going into the prison. TRCI staff also evacuated the facility’s administration building for preventative measures, he added.
PCA warehouse outskirts of walla walla??? By wallula??