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A wildfire that destroyed four homes in central Oregon was starting to stabilize on Monday, authorities said, while a blaze in Northern California wine country has so far spared some of the state’s most famous vineyards.
Moisture helped the 1,200 firefighters battling Oregon’s Flat Fire, but more work needed to be done. Dry, hot weather had fueled a rapid expansion of the blaze across 88 square kilometers of rugged terrain in Deschutes and Jefferson counties since the fire began late Thursday.
“Gotta love Mother Nature. It brought in a little bit of rain. Cooled the temps, relative humidity came up,” Travis Medema, the state’s chief deputy state fire marshal, told a community meeting in the town of Sisters. “The incident, for the first time in the last three days, is really beginning to stabilize.”
Officials said firefighters had protective lines of some sort around the entire fire, including roads, but the fire remained at five percent containment.
Authorities at one point ordered evacuations for more than 4,000 homes but lifted orders for some areas in the evening.
A heat advisory was in place through Wednesday, and forecasters warned that potential thunderstorms could create erratic winds that would challenge firefighters.
Flames in California’s wine country
Meanwhile, the Pickett Fire in Northern California has charred about 26 square kilometers of remote Napa County, known for its hundreds of wineries. It was 15 percent contained on Monday.
Flames spared the home and adjacent vineyards of Jayson Woodbridge of Hundred Acre wines, but he said it was a close call on Thursday when the fire broke out and raced along nearby slopes.
He and his son grabbed hoses and futilely began spraying down the steep hillsides. “The water was evaporating as fast as we were spraying it out there,” Woodbridge recalled Monday. “It was just a hot funnel of air. Fire was just engulfing everything.”
Before long, crews with bulldozers and air support arrived to protect the property. Water-dropping helicopters continued their flights on Monday, keeping the flames contained to canyons about 130 kilometers north of San Francisco.
With about a month to go before harvest, Woodbridge said his grapes won’t be damaged because of the “pure luck” of wind direction.
“The smoke won’t affect the fruit because the wind’s coming in from the west, thankfully,” Woodbridge said. That wasn’t the case in 2020 when toxic smoke from the Glass Fire caused Woodbridge and other wineries to scrap much of that year’s crop.
There have been no reports of damage to any vineyards from the Pickett Fire, said Michelle Novi with Napa Valley Vintners, a nonprofit trade association.
Firefighting resources have been put in place to protect wineries, especially as winds pick up later in the day, according to the California Department of Forestry & Fire Protection, or Cal Fire.
“With the weather over the last 48 hours, we’re seeing high temperatures, low humidity paired with some increasing wind in the late afternoon, which was giving our troops some additional work on the eastern side of this incident,” Cal Fire spokesperson Curtis Rhodes said on Monday.
A firefighter dies in Montana
In southwest Montana, a 60-year-old contract firefighter from Oregon died Sunday afternoon, from a cardiac emergency while battling the Bivens Creek fire.
Ruben Gonzeles Romero was among more than 700 firefighters working on the lightning-caused fire in the Tobacco Root Mountains about 24 kilometers north of Virginia City, Montana.
The Bivens Creek fire has burned approximately nine square kilometers since Aug. 13 in a remote area with thick timber and numerous dead trees.
Heat wave complicates the firefighting efforts
Residents of the western United States have been sweltering in a heat wave that hospitalized some people, with temperatures hitting dangerous levels throughout the weekend in Washington, Oregon, Southern California, Nevada and Arizona.
After a weekend of triple-digit temperatures, authorities in Multnomah County, Oregon, said they were investigating the death of a 56-year-old man as possibly heat-related.
The area of the Oregon fire is in a high desert climate, where dried grasses and juniper trees are burning and fire is racing through tinder-dry canyon areas where it’s challenging to create containment lines, said Deschutes County sheriff’s spokesperson Jason Carr.
In central California, the state’s largest blaze this year, the Gifford Fire, was at 95 percent containment Monday after charring nearly 534 square kilometers of dry brush in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties since erupting on Aug. 1. The cause is under investigation.
Although it’s difficult to directly tie a single fire or weather event directly to climate change, scientists say human-caused warming from burning fossil fuels like coal and gas is causing more intense heat waves and droughts, which in turn set the stage for more destructive wildfires.

MANILA: Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has fired his national police chief, who gained attention for leading the separate arrests of ex-President Rodrigo Duterte on orders of the International Criminal Court and televangelist Apollo Carreon Quiboloy, who is on the FBI’s most-wanted list for alleged child sex trafficking, Philippine officials said Tuesday.
Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin did not cite a reason for the removal of General Nicolas Torre as head of the 232,000-member national police force, a position he was appointed to by Marcos in May and which he would have held until 2027. He will be replaced by another senior police general, Jose Melencio Nartatez Jr. who assumed the top post Tuesday.
In a letter to Torre made public Tuesday, Bersamin informed him of his immediate removal as national police chief on orders of Marcos and directed him “to ensure the proper turnover of all matters, documents and information relative to your office.”
Torre was not immediately available for comment.
Ahead of his removal, Torre reportedly had differences with government officials over the national police chief’s decision to remove more than a dozen police officials from their posts, including Nartatez. The National Police Commission ordered Remulla to reinstate the police officials to their posts this month but that was apparently not immediately done.
“He did not violate any laws, he has not been charged criminally or administratively, it is simply a choice of the president to take a new direction for the national police,” Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla said without elaborating in a news conference when asked why Torre was removed.
Only the president can answer why Torre was removed, Remulla said without providing details. It’s not clear if Torre would be offered another government post.
Just a few days ago, Torre demonstrated to Marcos a new anti-crime battle room in the national police headquarters where officers could rapidly communicate by two-way radio and other communications system to respond to any law and order problem in five minutes or less.
In March, Torre led the chaotic arrest of Duterte at Manila’s international airport and his handover to International Criminal Court detention in The Netherlands for his deadly antidrug crackdowns. Duterte, who ended his six-year presidential term in 2022, has been accused of a crime against humanity for the brutal campaign against illegal drugs when he was in office and which left thousands of mostly poor suspects dead in police-enforced crackdowns that alarmed the United States, other Western governments and human rights watchdogs.
Duterte has denied ordering the executions of drug suspects but has publicly threatened to have suspected drug traffickers killed while he was a longtime mayor of southern Davao city and later as president.
Last year, Torre oversaw the arrest of Philippine religious leader Apollo Quiboloy, a key Duterte supporter who was placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list after being indicted for sexual abuses and trafficking of underage girls in the US Torre led thousands of policemen, who confronted large numbers of Quiboloy’s followers opposing the religious leader’s arrest in his vast religious complex in southern Davao city.
Quiboloy and his lawyers have denied the charges.
Quiboloy has been locked up since then in a metropolitan Manila jail for three criminal cases similar to his cases in the US, which Philippine Ambassador to Washington Jose Manuel Romualdez said has sought his extradition.