This is KGW News. At noon,
a pair of big fires lit up the morning
in Longview and Northeast Portland,
filling the skies with smoke
and creating air quality
concerns. Thank you for joining us today.
I'm Brenda Braxton.
This noon we start with that
warehouse or fire in Washington.
Thomas Schultz is there
live with an update.
Thomas, walk us through
what's going on right now.
Yeah, Brenda, right now a
helicopter has arrived on scene.
You might be able to hear it behind us.
And they're jumping buckets of water onto
the fire to help those firefighters.
Around 45 firefighters were here all
throughout the night and have contained
this fire to a chip pile at this point.
Fire Marshal John Dunaway says it all
started around 6:30 last night when
officials responded to the nip on Dyna Wave,
a chip operation commonly known
as warehouse or paper company.
That's who they leased the land to.
That's led to a haze of smoke across.
Longview and Even down into
Vancouver In Portland,
an air pollution advisory has been
released in Clark and Cowlitz County.
Because of the smoke from this fire,
Portland and Vancouver are also experiencing
hazardous air quality conditions.
Officials are urging Longview residents
with health conditions to close windows
of their home if smoke Smoke is nearby
and it is pervasive in the area.
Dunaway says there's no timeline yet
for when the fire will be extinguished,
but he says the arrival of a
helicopter changes how firefighters.
On the ground, fight the flames.
It's big.
Water in big drops is very much more
penetrating than our fire streams can do,
and at the same time we'll also
be able to pull that pile apart,
make those drops and just get
more water on the fire.
Help us put it out that much quicker.
Dunaway says there are buildings damaged,
but they don't yet know how many.
That's because the firefighters can't
yet get close enough to those buildings
to see the extent of the damages.
It's still unknown what
the cause of the fire was,
but fortunately Dunaway says there
are no injuries from the flame.
However, the wind is picking up out here,
which could be problematic for those
firefighters as they continue to fight the
fire and the smoke as well in Longview.
Thomas Schultz, KGW News
All right, Good though,
though to hear they're making progress.
Thomas, thank you.
In the meantime, Portland fire crews
spent their morning dealing with
this four alarm fire at a vacant
Kmart store in Northeast Portland.
The situation at 122nd and Sandy
is under control right now.
This fire started at 6:30 this morning.
It is a big building,
about 120,000 square feet.
As luck would have it, though,
a Portland fire training station
is right across the street,
so firefighters were able to
jump into action immediately even
though the building was empty.
The large parking lot created some issues,
but the challenges we had were
water supply having to pump hot from
hydrants a long ways away in we'd
actually had to use relay pumping to
establish enough water and pressure
to get the master streams operational.
So here's another view.
A passenger flying into PDX took this
picture of the fire from the plane's window.
Now if you live in the neighborhood,
you likely got a reverse 911 call to
shelter in place and to close your
windows because of all the smoke.
Air quality has been a problem
with both of these fires.
Rods here now with the latest numbers and
I have good news to share with you.
Earlier this morning for actually
for quite a number of hours we had
air quality parts of Multnomah.
Especially on the east side out
toward 2O5 and the Gateway area,
and then up into Clark County
where it was unhealthy,
moderate to unhealthy for
sensitive health risk air people.
Now I'm happy to report the worst.
We have moderate air quality over
Portland and up into downtown Vancouver.
That's the yellow dots.
It is moderate down over parts
of Marion County as well.
All the green dots are good,
but generally speaking that is
a much improved scenario over
really the last couple of hours
we started to see that improve.
Now if you look for the Wells Fargo camera,
this is still smoky haze laying down low,
the perfectly blue sky up top
and we are at 81 degrees.
Remember the other part of the
forecast today is hot weather coming.
We will be up into the 90s,
kind of similar scene out on the West side.
At noon as well, 83 in fact,
over the reserve Rangers and
Golf Club out in Aloha.
So here's our planner 81.
Currently I think we have a
chance to get up to 94 today.
You will likely be wherever we end up
the hottest day of this particular week.
And it will be a toasty evening,
still 88 at 8:00.
O'clock coming up.
More on how many days could
reach 90 degrees this week.
Also, we'll get into the records at Phoenix,
AZ has been setting.
You may have heard this nationally,
but they're going to set
another record today.
Brenda,
all of that's coming up.
All right, We'll see you then.
Thank you, Rod.
The biggest fire here in Oregon
now covers more than 12,000 acres.
We just got that update a few hours ago.
The flat fire is burning in Southern Oregon,
about an hour's Dr.
east of Gold Beach.
Officials are holding a community
meeting this afternoon to brief
people who live in the area,
and there is a red flag warning in
effect because of wind and low humidity.
The cause of the flat fire
remains under investigation.
When it comes to fighting wildfires,
cameras can help spot them early.
PGE just announced it's adding
six new ones east of the Cascades.
As Daisy Caballero shows us,
those cameras are powered by AI.
I really do truly believe that it's
a game changer for the Fire service.
For the last two years,
Portland General Electric
has partnered with Pano AI,
a company that creates mountaintop
cameras that use artificial intelligence.
To detect active smoke in wildfires
in a minimum 10 mile radius,
we take ultra high definition
security cameras and we rotate
them 360 degrees every minute.
And then we transmit the data to the
cloud using modern communication
technology like 5G cellular technology.
PGE currently has 27 of these cameras,
typically a top of communication towers
throughout the greater Portland area and
will add six more to the mix for starting
at the Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood.
It's brought together the fire agencies,
the utilities and the private
space together in a way to try to
tackle this issue as a we problem.
The overall goal here is to give PGE and
fire districts a better way to minimize
fire threats and track down a blaze.
As the A I camera pinpoints the exact
fire location and sends a notification
to your cell phone or e-mail,
something, the Clackamas Fire
District is beyond thankful for.
We're getting early detection,
We only run off of time,
and if we can, we can lessen
the time to get to that scene.
It's going to be a good outcome.
Each location has two cameras
that have a 160 degree view,
but they work together to
create a panoramic perspective,
giving fire districts and PGE a better
insight of what's actively going on.
As crews are able to be dispatched in
real time, I think that this will see over
and over again is going to
be saving homes and lives.
Oregon is one of six states in the US already
using this A I camera technology alongside
2 of Australia's biggest states. Well,
another big cat sighting on the Oregon coast,
Cannon Beach Police got a report about
an injured cougar in the Elk Creek area,
but they don't know if it's the same cat
that climbed Haystack Rock this week.
We've shown you still photographs of it,
but we just got this video yesterday.
As for the cougar in Elk Cove,
wildlife officials say it may have
an injured leg, so they're warning
people in the area to use caution.