Nate Cogsdale, of the Oregon Department of Forestry, readies a remote wildfire detection station on Thursday, May 25, 2023, in La Grande. The small building Cogsdale is in will soon be moved soon to a mountain site.   

LA GRANDE — Oregon Department of Forestry employees will be doing some heavy lifting in Northeastern Oregon forests in the next few weeks.

Their work will have a heavyweight impact on the Blue Mountain Interagency Dispatch Center’s ability to help get wildfires put out in their infancy, according to Logan McCrae, the La Grande unit forester for ODF.

The state agency is set to install three remote-controlled cameras on mountains in the four-county region of Union, Wallowa, Baker and Umatilla counties, bringing the total to nine. The locations of the cameras are not being released by the ODF to prevent vandalism.

These remote detection stations allow ODF and Forest Service employees to potentially see smoke from fires that aren’t visible otherwise.

“They are like unmanned lookout towers,” Cody Kingsbury, a forest officer for the ODF, said of the cameras.

Each station has a camera with a telephoto lens that can allow viewers to look up to 15 miles deep into landscapes. The images are then beamed from the approximately 10-foot by 15-foot buildings to the Blue Mountain Interagency Dispatch Center, at the Union County/La Grande Airport, via a satellite internet system.

At the dispatch center, fire officials will examine images to search for fires.

Each station has solar panels to generate the electricity for its camera and the computer equipment that sends images.

ODF began installing these mountaintop stations in 2021. The images have been sent to the agency’s La Grande office, but starting this summer they’ll be analyzed at the dispatch center.

The Blue Mountain Interagency Dispatch Center is run by ODF and the Forest Service, and staff there monitor wildfires across Northeastern Oregon and direct firefighting resources, on the ground and from the air, to attack blazes.

Using the dispatch center as the headquarters for analyzing images from the cameras will make it easier for ODF and Forest Service personnel since they will be doing it together in the same building, said Nate Cogsdale, a wildfire dispatcher and detection operator for ODF.

“When people are closer together they are able to communicate better,” he said.

The images have enough detail that staff can determine the color of smoke, which can help them gauge whether a blaze is burning grass or timber, McCrae said.

He said the remote detection site system is a great complement to the firefighting technology the ODF and the Forest Service already have in place in Northeastern Oregon.

“It is another important tool in our tool box,” McCrae said.