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A striking number of fires are caused by lightning Lightning strikes slam into the hills east of Ashland. Lightning strikes have accounted for 621 fires in ODF's Medford Unit since 2000. [Mail Tribune File Photo] Friday Jun 2, 2017 at 3:45 PM Jun 2, 2017 at 3:45 PM Mark Freeman Mail Tribune @MTwriterFreeman Though flames had been percolating in the brush and trees far from the roadway since lightning touched ground there Monday, it wasn't until a growing tower of smoke east of Roxy Ann Peak on Thursday revealed a wildfire. "It was quite literally in the middle of nowhere and we didn't see it for three days," Oregon Department of Forestry spokeswoman Melissa Cano says. "We had to hike in carrying the hoses and bladder bags." The relatively moist ground helped firefighters quell the blaze at 3.4 acres, but the charred speck of mid-elevation forest highlights just how sneaky and sinister lighting can be to wildland firefighting crews. "Lightning can be a threat not just for days but weeks after it strikes," she says. Wildlfire season begins Sunday in state-protected lands in Southern Oregon where hot, dry climate and a complex urban interface conspire to create more fires here annually than anywhere else in Oregon, state firefighters say. And among the myriad ways fires start here, lightning reigns supreme. ODF figures for wildfires logged in its Medford Unit since 2000 show 621 lightning-caused fires accounted for 42,089 of the 50,375 acres burned on ODF-protected lands. Both the number and acreage are tops for the unit, which largely encompasses Jackson County. And there's a good reason why it likely will remain the wildfire bogeyman. Lightning can't be predicted, can't be harnessed, usually strikes in out-of-the-way places here and is immune to education. "Lightning is one of our largest concerns," Cano says. "There's no fire-prevention message we can cater to lightning." The data set on fire ignitions spans 16 years and includes a wide range of weather and dryness patterns, but consistently it also shows that man and machines — and often just the machines themselves — trigger more than their fair share of wildfires. While the generic category of "equipment use" triggered 563 fires during that period, those fires blackened just 5,048 acres, statistics show. Cano says these fires usually are around people and more visible, so they get reported faster and get resources like fire crews and water-dropping helicopters onto them much more quickly than lightning fires. That's why the average lightning fire since 2000 burned 67.8 acres on private, county, state and federal Bureau of Land Management lands served by the ODF's Medford Unit. During that same time, equipment-use fires averaged 9 acres. But these are not your grandfather's equipment-use fires. "When people hear 'equipment,' they assume logger and crane operator but that's not the case," Cano says. "Roadside starts from cars, a downed power pole and just a wire to a pump next to the river all fall under this category." The third heaviest category of wildfire numbers and acreage burned are attributed to debris burning during the so-called "shoulder season" of before and after fire season, when rural landowners hop out back to get their burn piles taken care of. These fires occur when embers leave a burn pile or barrel and get into nearby grass or brush — usually in areas not properly cleared before burning, Cano says. "It doesn't take that much wind to pick it up and take it somewhere that's not prepared properly," Cano says. That's why ODF pushed fire-prevention education and clearing defensible spaces around rural structures to statistically improve people's chance of not falling victim to wildfires. But Cano still can't tell lightning how to behave. "No statistic can predict a lightning fire," Cano says. — Reach Mail Tribune reporter Mark Freeman at 541-776-4470 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MTwriterFreeman.