Central Oregon wildfire explainers
Five pages · last reviewed 30 July 2026
Every summer the same handful of questions come up around here, and the answers are scattered across agency PDFs, glossaries and out-of-state news copy. These pages put them in one place, in plain language, with the sources linked so you can check me.
They are written for Central Oregon specifically — Prineville, Bend, Redmond, Sisters, Madras, La Pine, Sunriver, Warm Springs and the country in between — because the answers here are local. Which sheriff issues your evacuation level, which National Weather Service zone you are in, which airport the tankers reload at, and which direction the smoke usually arrives from are all different depending on where you stand.
What "100% contained" actually means
"It says 100% contained — so it's out, right?" No. Containment measures the line around a fire, not how much has stopped burning. On the day I wrote that page, a fire eleven miles north of Prineville was 100% contained with 114 people still assigned to it.
Oregon evacuation levels 1, 2 and 3
"We're Level 2 — what does that mean I should do?" Be Ready, Be Set, Go Now, in the state's own words, plus who issues them, the five things people get wrong, and exactly where to look up your address in Crook, Deschutes and Jefferson counties and at Warm Springs.
Red flag warning vs fire weather watch
"There's a red flag warning — is that bad?" What the real criteria are for our zones, straight out of the interagency operating plan: lightning on dry fuels, a dry unstable airmass, or wind and low humidity measured at two weather stations for two straight hours. And why it is not an evacuation, not a burn ban, and not a prediction that a fire will start.
Why it's smoky, and where the smoke is coming from
"There's nothing burning nearby — why can't I see the Cascades?" Two numbers decide it: transport wind direction and mixing height. Both are forecast for this ground every hour, both are on the dashboard, and neither gets explained anywhere. Includes where to get real air quality data, which is not here.
The aircraft over a Central Oregon fire
"What's that plane doing circling for three hours?" Air attack, lead planes, tankers by type, scoopers, SEATs, helicopters, the Redmond smokejumpers, and the infrared flight that maps the fire at night. Plus the transponder code that means "I am working a fire," and why you cannot fly your drone out there.
How these are written
Every claim on these pages is either something you can check against a linked agency source or something measured directly from the feeds the dashboard already runs on, and where a figure comes from a measurement the page says which query produced it. Where a source turned out not to support a claim, the claim came out rather than getting softened — three of these five had exactly that done to them on a re-read, including one sentence attributed to a federal bulletin that the bulletin does not contain. A wildfire page that is confidently wrong is worse than one that does not exist.
They also get dated. Agency URLs rot, alert sign-up pages move, and a link that worked last August is not guaranteed to work this one, so each page carries the date its links were last checked and every outbound link on it was fetched on that date. If you find one that has gone bad, say so and it will get fixed.