The Ben Harrison Fire, sparked by lightning and first reported on Friday, Aug. 11, 2023, burns in the North Fork John Day Wilderness area west of Granite.

BAKER CITY — Not even the remnants of a hurricane can stifle Northeastern Oregon’s fire season with a week still left in August.

But the record-setting deluge that doused parts of the region on Monday, Aug. 21, had a major effect, at least temporarily, on the wildfire risk.

Two fire officials, Joel McCraw and Steve Meyer, both described the storm as “season-changing” but not season-ending.

“It certainly was different from our normal August rain events,” said McCraw, deputy fire staff for the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest.

“It was impressive” was the assessment from Meyer, the wildland fire supervisor for the Oregon Department of Forestry’s Baker City office.

Regardless of the adjective, the Aug. 21 rainfall, which resulted from what had been Hurricane Hilary, marked an exceedingly rare bout of tropical weather in arid Eastern Oregon.

Although rain fell across the region, most of the moisture was concentrated on and near Baker County.

The Baker City Airport more than doubled its previous record for Aug. 21 with 1.4 inches. A weather observer in New Bridge, about 3 miles north of Richland in eastern Baker County, measured 3.52 inches.

The Department of Forestry eased fire restrictions in Northeastern Oregon on Aug. 21, moving the fire danger from extreme to high.

The storm was noteworthy more for its geographic reach than for the rain volume in any given spot, Meyer said.

Thunderstorms can spawn downpours that dump an inch or more of rain, he said, but those tempests typically focus on a very small area, sometimes less than a square mile.

But on Aug. 21, rain fell across the entire county, and it lasted for several hours.

“That’s not typical for what we normally see,” Meyer said. “I’ve been doing this for 26 years and this is the first time I’ve seen widespread rain in August, and especially as much as we got.”

The dousing had the immediate effect of wetting wildfire fuels, ranging from “fine” fuels like grass to the longer-burning debris such as down logs, Meyer and McCraw said.

Fine fuels will dry relatively rapidly, although the National Weather Service is forecasting a chance of rain showers throughout this week before drier, hotter weather, more typical of late August, returns for the weekend and into early next week.

The larger fuels will hold moisture longer, which reduces the chances that a fire would burn for a long time, Meyer said.

Both he and McCraw emphasized that the fire season is not over.

“September can be very warm, with little rain,” McCraw said.

But they also pointed out that the risk of large blazes tends to start waning as August gives way to September. The longer nights and typically higher humidities shrink the “burning window” each day — the period when a fire will burn robustly and defy firefighters’ control efforts.

Meyer said the rain should reduce the chances for large fires the rest of the year in forests, although big blazes are still possible in the sagebrush and grass rangelands, which are dominated by fine fuels.

McCraw also noted that the northern half of the Wallowa-Whitman, in Union and Wallowa counties, didn’t get nearly as much rain as the southern half, in Baker County, did.