Oregon governor says she’s still waiting for White House help as Trump remains silent on wildfires

Oregon is one of several states fighting one of the worst wildfire seasons in history

At a Thursday press conference to update citizens on the wildfires ravaging her state, Oregon governor Kate Brown made clear just how serious the emergency is – and also said that she is still waiting for the Trump administration to offer help.

Asked what assistance she has requested at the national level, Ms Brown said the state was asking for help at “multiple levels”.

“We obviously asked for an emergency declaration, that came yesterday. We’re still waiting for White House response. We have asked [the] Department of Defence [for] an active battalion that’s trained in firefighting. And we are certainly asking other states for National Guard assistance.”

With strong winds and hot weather combining to create the perfect conditions for massive blazes to spread, Oregon is facing a fire emergency the like of which has never been seen before.

“We are now approaching over 900,000 acres burned across the state. To put that number into perspective, in the last ten years we see an average of 500,000 acres burned in an entire year. We’ve seen that nearly double in the past three days.

“We have never seen this amount of uncontained fire across our state.”

With 500,000 people – nearly 10 per cent of the state – now forced to evacuate their homes, Ms Brown warned Oregonians to remain alert.

“Please stay vigilant and listen to your local officials and firefighters,” she said. “If you are advised to evacuate, please do so immediately. You may not get a second chance.”

Saying the weather system is “not yet giving us a reprieve”, unstable weather conditions will keep making response efforts “very, very difficult”, she also echoed the governor of neighbouring Washington State in her diagnosis of the fundamental cause of the disaster.

“This will not be a one-time event. Unfortunately, it is the bellwether of the future. We are feeling the acute impacts of climate change. We are seeing its devastating impacts in Oregon, on the west coast, and frankly, throughout the entire world.”

Mr Trump and Ms Brown have clashed many times in the course of 2020 over the coronavirus and the Black Lives Matter movement.

In one spat at the end of August, as the protests sparked by the death of George Floyd kept raging, the president wrote that she and Portland mayor Ted Wheeler should “call up the National Guard like should have been done 3 months ago”. Ms Brown responded bluntly

“Oregon isn't interested in a role in your political theater, @realDonaldTrump,” she wrote. “The @OregonGuard is focused on fighting wildfires, distributing PPE & helping with unemployment calls. I'd love to discuss what we actually need: financial resources, N-95 masks & testing supplies.”

Meanwhile, Mr Trump has come in for criticism for saying next to nothing about the fires in public for weeks. At a campaign event in Pennsylvania in August, he blamed the California fires on bad forestry, claiming he had told the state to “clean their floors”.

“Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us,” he said.

However, the White House yesterday confirmed that Mr Trump spoke on the phone with California governor Gavin Newsom to “express his condolences for the loss of life and reiterate the administration’s full support”.