ENTERPRISE — August still isn’t over, so neither is fire season, but the season in the county has been tame so far, the Wallowa County Board of Commissioners said Wednesday, Aug. 21.

“It was brought to our attention by our emergency manager (Paul Karvoski) that Wallowa County had 377 positive lightning strikes during the month of July,” Commissioner Todd Nash said. “While other counties were burning up — and we certainly had some fires here — a lot of small fires were put out by (Oregon Department of Forestry crews) and others and kept us from being in the news with one of those 80,000-100,000-acre fires.”

Nash attributed the county’s relatively tame fire season thus far to quick and effective response by ODF, private landowners and commercial interests, such as logging crews.

“Because we didn’t make the news in that way, it’d be nice if we got an acknowledgement that we got four more strikes than anybody else in the entire state and probably fewer impacts than almost anybody that sustained even close to that,” Nash said.

Commissioner Susan Roberts agreed, noting that during an Aug. 1 meeting in Wallowa hosted by Matt Howard, incident commander and regional forester for the ODF, that the Winding Waters Complex of five relatively small fires peaked at about 750 acres. Alongside the ODF were county road crews and numerous landowners, loggers and mill workers who were instrumental in fighting the blazes.

“They said they would not have been able to do what they did without the help of the citizens of this county,” Roberts said. “They really commended the citizens of Wallowa County for not panicking, for thanking them for all the work that they did and this is one of the best counties because people here react positively and go anywhere they can to assist them.”

“It’s one advantage of keeping natural resources officers on the landscape,” Nash said.

Commissioner John Hillock also noted that the fire departments of Wallowa, Enterprise and Joseph all were mobilized to help. But he said it was ODF and private parties that were most instrumental.

“State forestry really jumped on things this year,” he said. “It was unprecedented, their speed this year compared to normal.”

Roberts emphasized the work of landowners and the volunteer spirit of county road crews who were willing to be out there on water trucks.

Tracy Brostrom, Wallowa Unit forester for ODF, couldn’t confirm the exact number of lightning strikes, but agreed with the commissioners that the ODF crews and private parties made the difference.

“What I would attribute it to is the past training that all of our crews have had in the past three to 10 years,” he said. “They know who to call.”

He said the combined effort certainly made the difference.

“It was a group and team effort with the folks in Wallowa County,” Brostrom said.