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Members of the Oregon Department of Forestry and cadets from Oregon Air Patrol attend a training on how to reload retardant into firefighting aircraft on Thursday, July 12, 2018, at Salem Municipal Airport.\u00a0Statesman Journal<\/span><\/p>\n Oregon will enter the hottest time of the season already facing widespread drought and heightened wildfire danger.<\/p>\n After a winter of below-average snowpack, and one of the hottest and driest spring seasons on record, much of Oregon could become a tinderbox by late summer and fall.<\/p>\n Seventy percent of Oregon\u00a0is already in severe or moderate drought and 95 percent is\u00a0classified as \u201cabnormally dry,\u201d according to a\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0issued Tuesday by the U.S. drought monitor.<\/p>\n That\u2019s largely due to May and June, which combined were the fifth-driest and eighth-hottest on record in the Willamette Valley, in records that go back to 1895, meteorologists at the National Weather Service said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe month of May really started us down this path, with very hot and dry weather, that mostly continued into June,\u201d NWS meteorologist Matthew Cullen said. \u201cLooking forward, we\u2019re expecting extremely hot and dry conditions that look likely to continue into late July.\u201d<\/p>\n Those conditions have already brought more wildfire than normal, and it\u2019s expected to get worse.<\/p>\n The number of acres burned by wildfires this season \u2014 125,000 acres \u2014 is already double that of recent years, according to numbers from the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center.<\/p>\n More:\u00a0<\/strong>Oregon wildfire cost skyrockets to $454 million in 2017<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n More:\u00a0<\/strong>Did the Forest Service ignore the Whitewater Fire and allow it to burn out of control?<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n That trend is expected to continue, with 90 to 100 percent of the state facing above normal danger for \u201csignificant wildland fire potential\u201d in July and August, according to a\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0by the National Interagency Fire Center.<\/p>\n \u201cBy late July, fire activity is expected to increase across Oregon and Washington,\u201d the report said. \u201cThe prevailing thought is that the summer of 2018 will be another hot and dry one.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”Re Blog ” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”]<\/p>\n Re Blog from<\/strong><\/span>:-<\/p>\n