Local fire crews responded to several blazes and brush fires on July 4, including at an abandoned house in Portland’s Lloyd District, on a riverside crane on Ross Island and at a Bi-Mart store in Sandy.
Many of the fires likely were sparked by illegal use of fireworks, said Rick Graves, a Portland Fire & Rescue spokesperson.
“Portland was a city filled with firework activity all day yesterday,” Graves said. “On top of regular accidental fires, of which we had plenty, with lives and structures saved, we had countless fires associated with aerial- and ground-based firework use.”
The Portland City Council voted in 2022 to ban the sale and use of fireworks year-round, citing rising temperatures, drought and increased fire risk. Temperatures at Portland International Airport on Tuesday nearly set a new high mark for Independence Day since record-keeping began there in 1940, falling just two degrees short of the 1972 record of 97 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.
Portland Fire crews responded shortly after midnight Wednesday to one of the biggest fires believed to have been sparked by fireworks. Graves said witnesses reported that someone threw fireworks into the abandoned duplex at 617 Northeast Halsey Street. The structure already had extensive damage from previous fires. Crews were able to get the blaze under control in about 30 minutes, Graves said.
Last July, fire crews found a man dead in the duplex after extinguishing one of the previous fires there.
Earlier in the evening, on Tuesday, Clackamas Fire responded to a blaze in Sandy believed to be started by a firework that landed on the roof of a Bi-Mart. “The fire melted the roofing and spread into the storage room and ignited some pillows,” Clackamas Fire said in a social-media post.
“The investigator was able to identify the firework debris on the roof which had ignited some leaves and needles that had built up,” district spokesperson Izak Hamilton told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “He also observed smoldering fireworks in the dumpster adjacent to the building.”
These two structure fires were preceded by multiple reported fires in Clackamas and Multnomah counties on a busy Independence Day. Nearly a third of the 27 fires Clackamas Fire District responded to Tuesday are confirmed to have been started by fireworks, while another nine are suspected of being started by fireworks, Hamilton said.
At around 6:20 p.m. Tuesday, Portland fire crews responded to reports of black smoke coming from a derelict crane alongside the Willamette River near Ross Island. A pair of fire boats were quickly able to extinguish the blaze, Graves said. The cause of the fire is not yet known.
Three hours later, Portland crews responded to a brush fire in the Lents neighborhood that took more than 45 minutes to control, and a brush fire in the Madison South neighborhood that came within 30 feet of homes on Rocky Butte.
Reports of dumpsters on fire in the St. Johns neighborhood and a roof fire sparked by a firework near Northeast Glisan Street between Northeast 97th and 99th avenues both came in around 10:40 p.m. Firefighters filled the dumpsters with water before the fire could spread to a nearby building, and the latter fire apparently was no longer burning by the time crews reached the scene.
— Nick Gibson; ngibson@oregonian.com; 971-393-8259; @newsynicholas
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