Jul. 12—Hot Lake Springs, whose story as a hotel and a medical center dates back more than a century, has a history as rich as its mineral-filled water.

The site, not surprisingly, is filled with remnants of this past, including some that are keeping embers of a bygone firefighting era alive — two small hydrants that have been shut off for many decades.

The hydrants are survivors of an era when Hot Lake virtually had its own fire department. The system included a network of approximately 14 hydrants, all installed by Hot Lake's owners about a century ago. This put Hot Lake in select company since at the time most fire hydrant systems were typically found only in incorporated towns and cities.

"Hot Lake was like a small municipality," said Dick Roth, of Orting, Washington, a historian and author who has written six books about Union County's history.

The old hydrant system Roth is referring to was fed by an unorthodox and memorable source, a concrete reservoir on the south hill behind Hot Lake's buildings. Water was pumped into the structure, which held thousands of gallons of water that flowed downhill through wooden pipes wrapped by wire.

The reservoir stopped being used many decades ago but it is still buoyant in Roth's mind.

"I used to play up there," said Roth, who grew up at Hot Lake in the 1940s and 1950s when it was owned by his parents, A.J. and Fern Roth.

Roth said wildlife were also attracted to the reservoir.

"Once I had to pull a dead deer out of there," said Roth, who discussed Hot Lake's former firefighting system in late June during a presentation at Grande Hot Springs RV Resort.

Another pillar of Hot Lake's old firefighting system was its Ford-La Grande chemical hose truck. It was a Model TT fire engine manufactured in March of 1921.

The vehicle's features included two 38-gallon chemical tanks and two hose baskets. The chemical tanks held soda, water and acid in separate compartments. When they needed to be used the tanks would be turned upside down, mixing the soda and water with acid to create a compound used to extinguish blazes.

These tanks were dangerous once their chemicals were activated since this caused pressure to build within them. While this could result in exploding or burst tanks, Roth said he knows of no instances in which chemical tanks exploded at Hot Lake.

Roth believes that the Model TT fire engine was last used on May 7, 1934, when a disastrous fire hit Hot Lake, destroying about two thirds of its 650-foot-long building complex, which included a hospital. He said the fire may have been started by sparks created by uninsulated wires coming into contact with one another because of strong winds. Roth said the fire started in the attic of Hot Lake's main building.

Hot Lake had 13 patients at the time, all of whom escaped unharmed and evacuated to Grande Ronde Hospital.

Roth said the blaze exposed the shortcomings of the era's firefighting equipment.

"The fire consumed almost the entire wood portion of the complex and demonstrated the inadequacies of available early day firefighting equipment," Roth wrote in his book "The Hot Lake Story."

Roth said the two 38-gallon tanks Hot Lake's fire truck had were no match for the large fire, for they were drained early in the course of the fire.

Today, Hot Lake's old fire truck, which Roth drove in parades in the 1960s, is on display at the Eastern Oregon Fire Museum, La Grande. The fire engine, while at Hot Lake, was kept in a building also used as a pump house and a machine shop. The brick building still stands.

Roth, who has authored four books about Hot Lake's past, said doing historical research about this area is a pursuit he will never tire of.

"I enjoy finding facts and separating truth from mythology," he said. "Truth is always more interesting than fiction or fabrication."

Dick Mason is a reporter with The Observer primarily covering the communities of North Powder, Imbler, Island City and Union, education, Union County veterans programs and local history.

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Fourth set of skeletal remains, as yet unidentified, discovered at Swim Beach in Nevada as lake hits lowest level in 80 years

A Cape Cod beach closed Saturday afternoon after a “number” of Portuguese man o’wars washed ashore.

More human remains have been found at drought-stricken Lake Mead National Recreation Area east of Las Vegas, authorities said Sunday. It’s the fourth time since May that remains have been uncovered as Western drought forces the shoreline to retreat at the shrinking Colorado River reservoir behind the Hoover Dam. National Park Service officials said rangers were called to the reservoir between Nevada and Arizona around 11 a.m. Saturday after skeletal remains were discovered at Swim Beach.

The United States Geological Survey reported a 2.3 magnitude earthquake around 8:05 p.m. in Deering.

With an estimated 115,000 pounds of debris accumulating on the reefs of Papahānaumokuākea, crews struggle against a pileup that keeps building.

It has been more than a month since the last tropical storm, Colin.

Several wildfires are burning across eastern Washington, scorching about 45,000 acres. Fire officials said they have made some progress in getting the Vantage Highway Fire under control, but said there are still a lot of unburned areas that could further fuel the fire. The Vantage Highway Fire flared up Monday and has burned at least 30,000 acres.

Deer hunters will have the option of another weapon this fall as air powered arrow rifles have been legalized for hunting in Oklahoma.

A flood watch is up for DeKalb and McHenry counties, where up to 2 inches of rain has already fallen.

The U.S Fish and Wildlife Service on Friday shared a striking image showing silver carp leaping en masse during a scientific electrofishing operation.

A wildfire burning in a remote area just south of the Oregon border appears to have caused the deaths of tens of thousands of Klamath River fish, the Karuk Tribe said Saturday. The tribe said in a statement that the dead fish of all species were found Friday near Happy Camp, California, along the main stem of the Klamath River. Tribal fisheries biologists believe a flash flood caused by heavy rains over the burn area caused a massive debris flow that entered the river at or near Humbug Creek and McKinney Creek, said Craig Tucker, a spokesman for the tribe.

Millions of households across the south of England could be hit with hosepipe bans within days after the Environment Secretary urged more water companies to introduce urgent restrictions.

Mats of Sargassum seaweed off the coast of St. Martin in April 2018. ELY Michel CC BY-SA 4.0, , CC BY-SAHere’s a handy geography question for your next trivia match: What is the world’s only sea that doesn’t have a land border? The answer is the Sargasso Sea – a 2-million-square-nautical-mile haven of biodiversity that lies east of Bermuda in the Atlantic Ocean. Rather than beaches, it’s bounded by rotating ocean currents that form the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre. The Sargasso is named for s

The first grain ship to leave a Ukrainian port under a deal brokered last month will not arrive in Lebanon on Sunday as planned, the Ukrainian embassy in Lebanon said. The Razoni left Odesa on the Black Sea early last Monday carrying 26,527 tonnes of corn and was set to dock on Sunday in the northern Lebanese port city of Tripoli, according to Ukrainian officials and Lebanese port authorities. But the Ukrainian embassy in Lebanon told Reuters on Sunday the ship was "having a delay" and "not arriving today," with no details on a new arrival date or the cause of the postponement.

For Ben Novak, it started with a dead sheep. The horned beast’s head had hung on the wall of the museum at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota for as long as he could remember, commemorating the president who was the father of the American conservation movement.

Flash flooding stranded park visitors and washed out roads after the national park experienced the second-wettest day in its recorded history.

The previous record was 4.59 inches on August 1, 1975.

STORY: About 60 cars belonging to park visitors and staff were buried under several feet of debris at the Inn at Death Valley, an historic luxury hotel near the park headquarters in Furnace Creek, the site of a spring-fed oasis near the Nevada border, the park said in a statement.Floodwaters also pushed trash dumpsters into parked cars, shoved vehicles into each other, and swamped many facilities, some hotel rooms and business offices, it said.No injuries were reported. But about 500 visitors and 500 park staff were temporarily unable to leave the park because all roads into and out of Death Valley were closed, according to the statement. After work by emergency crews, authorities escorted the cars out of the area.Authorities are conducting aerial searches for stranded motorists but said they have not received reports of stranded cars, Death Valley National Park wrote on its Facebook page.They expect to reopen a particularly damaged area of Highway 190 by Tuesday (August 9).The flooding was unleashed by a torrential shower that dumped 1.46 inches of rain at Furnace Creek, nearly matching the previous daily record there of 1.47 inches measured from a downpour in 1988, park spokesperson Amy Wines said.

Biologists with the Karuk Tribe believe a flash flood caused by heavy rains over the burn area caused a massive debris flow that entered the river.