ARCH CAPE It may take two days to properly contain the fires burning in Arch Cape and northern Tillamook County.

That was the message Friday from Ashley Lertora, public information officer for the Oregon Department of Forestry and thats if the cooperating agencies get all of the resources they need.

Two fires covering roughly 125 acres total are keeping approximately 120 firefighters from the ODF and local fire departments busy working to contain and extinguish the fires.

Gilberto Garcia, of Cannon Beach, walks out onto the beach at Arch Cape to observe the smoke rising from the hills near Angora Peak Friday. Garcia said he was a volunteer firefighter for 16 years and has “never seen anything of this magnitude” in the area.

A temporary flight restriction is in place while the fire-fighting efforts continue into the weekend.

The smaller fire, covering 30 acres just off of East Shingle Mill Lane in Arch Cape, was first spotted at around 11 a.m. Thursday. The land is owned by Stimson Lumber.

At 9 p.m., the larger fire, covering 50 to 80 acres near Falcon Cove between Arch Cape and Manzanita, was spotted to the south of the other fire.

Tom Bennett from Clatsop County said Friday that the fires were mostly under control and monitoring would take place in the next day or two.

“They’re going to be monitoring it, they’re going to have crews and equipment there over the night to make sure it’s not going to flare up.”

ODFs Lertora said as crews get a handle on the fires, “We’ll be scaling back the personnel, little by little.”

“The Shingle fire is 30 acres, there was no real significant growth today. … she said. “We are gaining on it. We have a line around one fire.”

The larger burned acreage is in Tillamook County. Helicopter crews from Applebee Aviation in Banks and Terra Helicopters in McMinnville carried 200-gallon Bambi Buckets filled with water to hot spots on the Falcon Fire.

The Falcon fire, we don’t have an accurate acreage on it yet,” Lertora said. It’s approximately 50 to 80 acres. We’ve worked on it hard all day with helicopter crews. … We made great progress on that. Over the next few days we’re still going to be out here still working on it.

“Tomorrow we’re going to put the hand crews on the Falcon crew so that we can work on that remaining 75 percent of the line around that. We’re using excavators and dozers as well as hand crews to get that line.”

The fires started Thursday. The forestry department and rural fire district volunteers began shifting some of their resources to what became an out-of-control blaze by early Friday morning. Stimson Lumber co-owns the land with Weyerhaeuser Company.

As reported earlier, Dave Horning, wildland fire supervisor from the Astoria District of the forestry department, said the fires started because the timber companies were burning slash — the debris left over from logging that can smolder for weeks after being lit.

After a spell of unusually dry winter weather, strong easterly winds as high as 60 miles per hour fanned the flames and pushed sparks into the areas surrounding the actively burning slash piles.

Crews from Astoria, Knappa, Gearhart, Seaside, Cannon Beach, Hamlet, Olney and Nehalem Bay were among those helping. Inmate crews from the South Fork Correctional Center in Tillamook County also assisted.

Photographer Alex Pajunas contributed to this story