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MICHAEL DUNNE: I'm Michael Dunne. It seemed simple enough the Oregon legislature was to consider and pass legislation to create a map of fire vulnerable areas in the state. The map would help determine which areas were most fire prone, and then home and property owners could work to fire harden them. But like anything in our polarized political world, nothing is ever simple. Today on the show, you'll hear from a reporter with ProPublica who did an investigative piece on how rumors, conspiracies and outright lies about what the fire maps would and would not do ultimately sank the idea's passage. It's a tale of insurance fears and mistrust of government in a state increasingly beleaguered by fire. Then in the last part of the show, we'll check in with a reporter in Central Oregon about how fire season and staffing shortages are impacting that region.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Rob Davis, a reporter with ProPublica that covers the Northwest. Thanks so much for coming on and talking to us.
ROB DAVIS: It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
MICHAEL DUNNE: You wrote a story that intrigued me. It was titled, How the rapid spread of misinformation pushed Oregon lawmakers to kill the state's wildfire risk map. Why don't you give us an overview of your story?
ROB DAVIS: Sure, you know, your listeners will certainly remember that the catastrophic 2020, wildfire season here, you know, 1000s of homes burned. The state had been talking about how to adapt to hotter, drier summers, and out of that moment came Senate Bill 762 which included a couple 100 million dollars for improving readiness, but it also included this little requirement that nobody seemed to really pay much attention to in the moment, which was that that scientists at Oregon State should map the areas of the state that were at higher highest risk for wildfires, and the state was going to then use that to narrow the roughly 2 million tax lots in the state to the ones that were most at need for what was going to be requirements for defensible space, clearing vegetation around homes and home hardening for new construction, so things like metal roofs, you know, Not allowing wood siding, that sort of thing.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Okay, the map didn't pass. So, kind of what happened here?
ROB DAVIS: So, the map came out. They gave lawmakers a year deadline for the work to be done, and the map just sort of emerged in 2022 as an issue that landed in 1000s of mailboxes around the state. Nobody really knew that it was coming. There was not a lot of public outreaches done. There was discussion about doing public outreach, but it ultimately didn't really happen. So, 1000s and 1000s of Oregonians learned that they were in what were called extreme risk zones from sort of bureaucratic letter in the mail, and, and it just kind of crash landed, I think, in people's awareness and it gave people 60 days to appeal or comply with building codes and defensible space code that had not yet been completed. And so, I think there was a lot of uncertainty in that moment that happened at the same time. You know, there are more and more natural disasters happening in our country. The cost of insurance is going up. Policy cancellations are becoming more common. Insurance premiums are increasing, and that map landed at a time in Oregon where that was really starting to hit home and people looked at the state's wildfire risk map and their cancellations and said, Well, certainly I'm getting my policy canceled because. Yes, this risk map exists, and the map in that moment, kind of became this boogeyman that was responsible for a lot of harms that were reported but not substantiated. And folks in the insurance industry. Regulators of the insurance industry looked at this and said, there's no way that insurance companies are using the map to make these kinds of decisions here. But that didn't stop this sort of whirlwind of misinformation from spinning up around this issue and saying, you know, even, even four years later, three years later, you know you have folks saying, you have legislators saying that there were policy cancellations because of the state's risk map. There's no evidence of that. There has been no evidence of it. Lawmakers in 2023 explicitly made it illegal for the state's risk map to be used, just as a way to reemphasize that it was not being used. And this whirlwind of misinformation just sucked that idea up and started spinning and never really stopped.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Pardon the pun, but this misinformation, as your story points out, spread like wildfire, and is it that there was a vacuum of digestible, easily understandable information from the state about what the maps would and wouldn't do. That left a lot of people not understanding what was going to happen. And so that vacuum got filled by misinformation and conspiracy theory.
ROB DAVIS: I think you just said it. You know, there was, there was a view of, you know, how could the state do this? How could this be so poorly thought out? What are they really trying to do? And you see the sort of conspiracy theories whipping up. Not only is it something that insurance companies are using in this telling, it's not just being used by insurance companies, but it's the Democrats in Salem, and they're trying to push rural Oregonians off of their land. And you know, they want to tell us what we can do on our private property. And, really the stated objective, it was quite the opposite. It was making sure that folks aren't pushed off their land, that if a wildfire comes through, that their home is, you know, is protected, the types of strategies, these ideas of defensible space, you know, making sure that you don't have a juniper Bush growing right up against your house, so that if an ember lands. You know, wind born embers are a huge source of fire in these wind blowing fires and, you know, home hardening. These have been scientifically proven to work to reduce the likelihood that homes burn. And yet it sort of, you know, turned into this conspiracy that, that, that, that, you know, Democrats wanted to push people out of rural Oregon.
MICHAEL DUNNE: You cover the Northwest; you know that there is this tension between rural and urban Oregon. In fact, this greater Idaho movement, sort of fancifully looking to rip rural eastern Oregon away from Portland and make it more Idaho based. Talk about this, this natural and seemingly growing mistrust between Eastern Oregon, rural parts of the state, versus the i Five corridor, and how that helped give rise to this tension in something that you think would be somewhat uncontroversial, a fire map showing risk factors for our ever-growing wildfire season.
ROB DAVIS: I mean, there are a lot of complicated factors to pull apart here, but I think one of them is overarching. One is that we're not only in a moment of misinformation in our country, but we're in a moment of deep distrust of authority and so it is in that space that you see these ideas rising and just taking off. This bill passed in legislature that was held remotely, you know, in in a moment of, you know, covid Born distrust of government and the opposition, some of the opposition to this map gets stirred up in Facebook, and, you know, a private group in Facebook with 6000 people who all are opposed to the map and are all talking about all of the ways that it's harming them and playing to confirmation bias. You know, this is a place that you can go, and you will see folks saying that Zillow and other real estate sites which have begun posting wildfire risk scores for homes that are for sale online, you see folks saying that they're using the Oregon wildfire risk map to make their calculations. I talked to Zillow, they said, we use data from a research firm called First Street. I talked to First Street. I said, Do you use Oregon's risk map? They said, No, we don't, but that is part of the oxygen that is being breathed in groups like that. They are talking about the risk map as the source of lots of ideas and harms that it is not the source of and you see that being emphasized at times by state lawmakers you know who, who are talking in press conferences and press releases about the harm that the map has wrought. House Republican whip Virgil Osborne said in May these wildfire maps cost people, property values, insurance increases and many heartaches, the heartaches, part of that may be correct. Property values could be impacted by folks understanding the risk that wildfire poses in a hotter and drier climate, but there have been no documented insurance increases caused by the state's risk map, insurance companies. What? What folks who are far more knowledgeable about the insurance industry than I have told me is that, you know, the insurance companies have the ultimate skin in the game in terms of their putting their dollars at risk by deciding whether to insure or not, and they were not waiting around for Oregon to come up with its own risk map to make decisions about insurability or price. You see these types of ideas coming up around flood risk maps, you know it is there. There are, there are folks, whether it is in the real estate industry or property owners, who don't want the risks known that are associated with their properties and it often that information has been suppressed to the harm of people who are living, working, residing and in places where that risk is real, and it is increasing as Oregon gets hotter, as We know, as we go outside today and drier during the summer.
MICHAEL DUNNE: I had House Minority Leader Christine Drazan on my show talking about different things, and she looked at this as a real win for her caucus to push these maps aside and say that they won't be, you know, made the official maps. And I'm wondering, you talk to legislators on both sides of this issue, and I imagine they have to face their constituents and talk about macro risk of wildfire in Oregon, but also micro risk in terms of whether or not your house is considered at risk property. What were some of the things that the legislators telling you about their various sides of this issue?
ROB DAVIS: I talked to Rep. Drazan about this, and she said, You know, I said, Where, what was the demonstrable harm she did in the press conference, was citing over again and again, the harm that the map had caused. And I said, Where is the evidence of it? And, you know, and it came down to what people felt. And she said, You know, I'm reflecting what people feel. And I found that, I found that really interesting, you know? I said, Do you think that this, that there's, there's a nexus between these insurance decisions in the map. She said, sort of, who's to say? Well, you know, we have talked and heard from, you know, insurance regulators who have direct line to insurance companies, you know, and the insurance regulators from in Oregon after these, you know this, after the cloud of misinformation started spinning in 2022 went to insurance companies, and they filed, you Know, responses with insurance companies filed responses with the state to say, you know, answering the questions sort of under oath, did you use our map? And all of the insurance companies said, No, we have our own maps. You know, it became opposition. It became a bipartisan affair with the exception of one lawmaker, a firefighter who said, you know, I can't in good conscience vote to kill these mandates for home hardening and defensible space. But it became a bipartisan affair because opposition to the map was sort of a big tent.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Rob Davis, a reporter with ProPublica who covers the Northwest, thank you so much for coming on and talking about your story.
ROB DAVIS: Hey, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Luckily, fire season is actually not going too badly in Central Oregon. We check in now with an environment reporter at the bulletin. Michael Kohn, the public lands and environment reporter with The Bulletin in Bend. Thank you so much for coming on and talking with us.
MICHAEL KOHN: Yeah, thank you for having me.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Why don't you tell us generally speaking, how is the 2025 fire season going in Central Oregon?
MICHAEL KOHN: I would say it's going a lot better than it was last year. Last year, we had a record-breaking number of acres burned across Oregon and Central Oregon. This year we had a week or so of fire, but light fire, but we did have the CRAM fire, which is a large fire in Jefferson County. But apart from that, it has generally been an easy fire season.
MICHAEL DUNNE: When you talk to experts, is it a question of luck, or are there, or were there, particular conditions that make it a less severe fire season this year?
MICHAEL KOHN: Yeah, people are saying that just the weather patterns this year have been a little easier. We had kind of a wet, definitely a wet winter, and then we had a sort of a long dry period, but it didn't get too hot. We didn't have extremely hot conditions yet this year. So those, those factors helped in the you know, the large amount of snow back that we had this winter helped to keep forests damp longer into the spring.
MICHAEL DUNNE: There's been a lot made about massive layoffs at the federal level, and how that permeates down across the US and certainly locally. And I'm wondering, with the people you talk to and the beat that you cover, have you seen impacts, whether it's fire suppression or just overall staffing and in wildlife wilderness areas, if you could give us kind of from your view, how some of these federal staffing cuts are impacting again, the region that you cover?
MICHAEL KOHN: Well, it's hard to say without actually being in those offices, being with Forest Service people in their office, and understanding the day-to-day problems that they're dealing with those staffing cuts. But from a kind of outside perspective. Active. So far, we have not seen the sort of dire forecast that we had thought. You know, when all this happened back in February, there were worries that there would just be trash everywhere, and trails would be closed and bathrooms would be locked up. So far, we haven't really seen that in the Deschutes National Forest, and speaking with people that have been to Crater Lake, it just seems like business as usual. So, from what we can tell, in the short term, things are still going okay. I would say now how things play out longer with research, we just don't know. It's a little too early to say and hard to know. But so far, in terms of tourists going out there into the forest and recreating, things haven't changed that much.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Okay. Thinking that perhaps we won't have as good of a winter this year, and you know, with situations becoming drier and more dire, pardon the pun there. Pardon the rhyme. What are some of the forecasting forecasters that you've talked to thinking about lower staffing numbers and a dry winter could create a really volatile situation next summer?
MICHAEL KOHN: Yeah, it's quite possible. Yeah, we could speculate on the possibilities of that happening. I think one of the worries at the beginning of all this was that wildland firefighter numbers would be cut, but that also doesn't seem to have happened. The numbers seem to be basically on par with what they were in the past, and firefighters have done a very good job this year, at least what we've seen with the CRAM fire and some fires near crooked River Ranch, just doing initial attack and putting out these fires as quickly as possible. So far, what we've seen is, even though their resources may have been tightened or cut, they've been doing a very good job this year. As you say, if drought really comes back into full force like we saw two or three years ago, that might be a different story.
MICHAEL DUNNE: Michael Kohn, he's the public lands and environment reporter for The Bulletin. And bend again, thanks so much for coming on chatting.
MICHAEL KOHN: Yeah. Thank you very much for having me.
MICHAEL DUNNE: That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon On The Record are available as a podcast at KLCC.org. Tomorrow on the show, you'll hear a good news story about how access and the availability of child care in Oregon is actually increasing. I'm Michael Dunne, and this has been Oregon On The Record from KLCC. Thanks for listening.
