Gov. Tina Kotek, flanked by wildfire officials, said it on Thursday: Despite a recent break in the weather and a dab of rain here and there, the record-setting fire season of 2024 isn’t over.

And then events over the weekend confirmed her assessment.

By the time Sunday was over, the Copperfield Fire in Klamath County, pushed by 40-mph winds, had been declared a conflagration, racing to nearly 2,000 acres as the region sweated under a red flag fire-weather warning. It was the 14th time this year Kotek has invoked the Conflagration Act, in which a governor determines that threats to life, safety, and property exist because of the fire, and that the threats exceed the capabilities of local firefighting personnel and equipment.

In Eastern Oregon, a Level 3 “Go Now” evacuation advisory was issued Monday in Grant County because of the threat posed by the Rail Ridge Fire. That fire was reported at about 3 a.m. Monday. Just 12 hours later, it had jumped the South Fork of the John Day River, according to the website Watch Duty.

It’s easy (and understandable, considering the fire season that Eastern Oregon already has endured) to relax a bit when Labor Day comes and goes, when the calendar turns to September, when you can see your breath for the first time in the morning.

But the truth is that fire season in the West these days isn’t over until the snow starts to fall (and maybe, in some cases, not even then).

Kotek and the wildfire officials who appeared with her Thursday at a press conference at the Portland headquarters of the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center, emphasized that point.

“I think we’re all feeling good a little bit about the humidity and the rain we’ve been having, but the conditions are still dry,” Kotek said, according to an account in the Oregon Capital Chronicle. “A day of rain is not going to solve this problem.”

And there may not be even a day of rain in the first few weeks of September: Forecasts this week in Pendleton, La Grande and throughout Eastern Oregon call for mostly sunny skies and high temperatures in the 90s. With tinder-dry conditions still the norm throughout the region, weather like that won’t do anything to reduce the risk that a fire, once started, could make a serious run in a hurry.

One of the few bits of good news thus far in this fire season is that most of the fires have been started by natural causes such as lightning. That’s not usually the case: In a typical fire season across Oregon, more than 70% of fires are caused by humans.

This September would be a bad time for we humans to revert to form and start triggering fires through a careless action — and it takes just one careless action for a fire to quickly get out of hand, with potentially ruinous consequences. Let’s not be responsible for making a bad fire season even worse.

In an Oregon September, it’s easy to buy into the telltale early signs that autumn is on the way, too easy to let down our guard when we set out to spend precious time in our spectacular outdoors. But fire season isn’t likely to release its grip on us until those days when we can see our breath not just first thing in the morning, but pretty much around the clock.