'We don't get out and do much' — Smoke from wildfires keeps former Miamians indoors

Sep. 17--GRANTS PASS, Ore. -- Former Miamian Kurt Witten said pictures he has posted on social media of the smoke and ash created by the massive and deadly West Coast wildfires don't give a true indication of how thing actually are in southwestern Oregon.

"My phone kinda filters the smoke out a bit, but its really like its incredibly foggy," Witten said. "We try to dodge the smoke. We don't get out and do a whole lot."

Witten is senior pastor at Redwood Christian Church in Grants Pass, Oregon.

He and his wife, Jennifer, moved to the Pacific Northwest in 2016.

As of Monday, a total of 7,718 fires have burned 3,451,428 acres, more than 3% of the state's roughly 100 million acres of land, making 2020 the largest wildfire season recorded in California history, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

There are more than 16,000 firefighters battling wildfires in California, Oregon and Washington state.

Fires have killed 24 and more than 4,200 structures have been destroyed.

"It really looks like a tornado, except the ground is black from where it burned it," Witten said. "There are random pieces of structures still standing, but they're just gone."

The smoke led Major League baseball to shift a two-game series at Seattle (more than 400 miles north of Grants Pass) between the Mariners and San Francisco Giants that was to begin Wednesday to San Francisco because of very unhealthy air quality -- even with the stadium roof closed.

"Where we're at, our air quality index (Wednesday afternoon) was 336," Witten said. "I don't know what that means, but it sounds bad. That's listed as 'hazardous,' which I think is at the top of their listing.

"Actually we have the best air quality of any of the communities around us. We're a valley with about 1,000 and 1,200 feet elevation, so we're the low spot, Around us are mountains that go 4,500 to 5,000 feet and a lot of the other towns are 1,500 to 2,000 feet elevation. We collect it all (the smoke). We don't get much wind here."

The air quality in Portland, Oregon, -- 244 miles north of Grants Pass -- is ranked as the worst in the world.

Two major fires are east of Grants Pass -- the Slater and Obenchain fires.

"The ones that are in the news are the fires that are threatening the towns," Witten said. "Last week, there were the ones that took out the towns of Phenix and Talent here."

Witten said a lot of the fires are in the middle of forests, but crews are attempting to save towns that are in their path.

"A lot of the fires that are burning in the middle of forests and they are mainly trying to protect the towns. They try to contain them and let nature burn themselves out," he said.

"They fight them the best that they can fight them, but there's a bunch of legislative restrictions on what they are allowed to do and how they are allowed to fight them. There's a lot of legislative restrictions on the logging industry that allows a lot of dead trees to stand and a lot of overgrowth to stand. It's like everything else, it's become a very political issue out here."

While California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti say the severity of this season's fires are due to climate change, President Donald Trump claims the fires are due to poor land management.

An interactive map from the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center can be seen at https://gacc.nifc.gov/nwcc/information/firemap.aspx

-- The Associated Press contributed information to this report.

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