Active wildfires in Oregon and Washington, evacuations and infrastructure threatened

The document describing the status of wildfires in the United States is not a news article but an operational report: the Incident Management Situation Report of the National Interagency Fire Center, updated as of 07:30 Mountain time on Wednesday, August 19, 2026. It is the document that crews use to decide where to move personnel and equipment, and for this reason it is more sober and more reliable than any secondhand account.

The main fire front reported for Oregon is the Grasshopper fire, in the Mount Hood National Forest, about fourteen miles southwest of Dufur. The report describes active fire behavior and indicates that it threatens numerous homes and critical infrastructure. The phrase “critical infrastructure” in the language of the bulletin is not rhetorical: it identifies elements whose loss produces damage beyond the fire perimeter, such as power lines, repeater stations or water systems.

The same management group is monitoring two other fires in the same area: the Austin fire, twenty-five miles southeast of Estacada, and the Narrows fire, fifteen miles southeast of the same location. The concentration of multiple events under a single command is, in itself, information about the state of available resources: it means that crews are covering multiple fronts at once within a limited radius.

In Washington state the bulletin reports the Three Queens fire, in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, six miles east of Snoqualmie. Multiple fires currently have evacuations and closures of areas, roads and trails in effect: these are the measures that, in the U.S. system, precede and accompany intervention, and their presence in the report indicates that the risk concerns resident population and roadways, not just forest area.

It must be stated clearly to the reader: the news currently comes from a single source, the National Interagency Fire Center report; no independent confirmation is currently available. It is, however, a primary and institutional source — the federal agency that coordinates the fire response — and the data reported are those of its bulletin, not a reworking. We do not have, in this material, either burned acreage or containment percentages: where the document does not provide figures, neither do we.

Ten days after the Colombian earthquake. On the other side of the continent, assistance continues for the areas affected by the earthquake of August 10, 2026 in Colombia. Ecuador has sent donations for assistance to the population, as indicated by the EFE news agency’s agenda picked up by Infobae. In the damaged areas, the education of thousands of children has been compromised: this is the least immediate consequence of an earthquake and the longest to resolve, because it depends on school buildings being usable, not on the distribution of aid.

In Venezuela, also hit by two strong earthquakes, the company Citgo has allocated three million dollars as initial aid, according to the Venezuelan press review gathered by Curadas. The qualifier “initial” is the one used by the source and should be taken literally: it indicates a first allocation, not the total scope of the announced intervention.

On the death toll from the Colombian earthquake, the material available today contains no numerical update compared to what has already been published. In the absence of a new verifiable figure, we do not publish one: a repetition presented as an update would be, for a reader who has been following the matter for ten days, false information about the direction of the data.