The following transcript was generated using automated transcription software for the accessibility and convenience of our audience. While we strive for accuracy, the automated process may introduce errors, omissions, or misinterpretations. This transcript is intended as a helpful companion to the original audio and should not be considered a verbatim record. For the most accurate representation, please refer to the audio recording.
Michael Dunne: I'm Michael Dunne. For quite some time, it hasn't exactly been news that Oregon experiences bad fire seasons during the summer, and this year is no different. What is different this year, however, is the amount of uncertainty around the availability of federal resources to help fight those fires. Coupled with our historically low snowfall this winter, and the prospect of mega fires hitting the state has many people on edge. Today on the show, we talk with an Oregon Capital Chronicle reporter about what Gov. Kotek and Oregon's federal delegation are saying and worrying about with regard to the upcoming fire season. Then in the second part of the show, we talk with a reporter at OPB about the historic season opener for Oregon's newest pro team. The WNBA's Portland Fire set an attendance record on opening night, and fan enthusiasm was off the charts. Alex Baumhardt, a reporter with The Oregon Capital Chronicle, joins me now. Alex Baumhardt, senior reporter with The Oregon Capital Chronicle. Alex, always great to talk to you. How are you?
Alex Baumhardt: I'm good. Thanks for having me.
Dunne: And always appreciate your contributions to the show. So you attended a recent press event with Gov. Kotek talking about fire season. What did the governor say?
Baumhardt: She said it will be a hotter, longer fire season this summer, but that overall the state was pretty prepared to respond. I think the big message, beyond "it'll be tough and we're ready," was: please don't contribute to any more human-caused wildfires. Those were the bulk of wildfires last year, which is kind of a change. The emphasis was, be smart about starting fires, where, when and why.
Dunne: And I was going to say it's kind of a change, right? We're more used to naturally caused fires. That was a bit of an outlier.
Baumhardt: Yeah, it had been trending downward, in no small part because the state had invested quite a bit in messaging about smarter debris burning and campfire safety. The campaigns that had been effective in years past just didn't resonate last year. Some of that was probably a little overconfidence. I talked to the Department of Forestry head last year, who said basically there was enough wet weather that it probably made people feel more confident about burning than they should have been. So if this summer continues to be this dry, I would imagine people feel less confident about burning their trash and debris, and probably a little smarter about putting out a campfire.
Dunne: Remind folks just how dry our winter was this year.
Baumhardt: Yeah, we've tied a record heat figure going back to the 1930s, and we have about a third of the snowpack that we typically have during the winter. It's a bad combination. It's been very hot and very dry, and it's not likely to turn around anytime soon.
Dunne: OK. Some of us might remember last season was definitely a concerning fire season, but as I understand it, we had less acreage burn. Is the governor concerned that compared to last year, this could be quite historic?
Baumhardt: It's a good question. I didn't get that impression from her. I think the big message was that the reason those fires didn't get too out of control last year, rather than burning more acreage, was because there have been massive investments in the state's infrastructure and workforce for wildfire response and prevention since 2020. The bulk of those fires last year were put out pretty quickly, and for the ones that grew, they had the resources and the relationships to get local fire districts and fire departments on them, to get help from the feds. They had the aircraft, engines and monitoring equipment needed to predict where fires were going to move. So in general, you're seeing way more confidence from the governor and from state fire experts and leaders, because we've had about five years of pretty record investment in the type of infrastructure you need to respond to wildfires in the West. Oregon was probably behind other states like California and Washington before, and we may still be behind on a local level, but we are way better than we were five years ago.
Dunne: OK, and that's great. However, we do hope and rely on federal support. Talk a little about that, because that may be the big question going into what could be a really bad fire season.
Baumhardt: Yeah, more than half of Oregon's land is owned and managed by the federal government. There are these partnerships in place. Fire doesn't abide by boundaries. A fire that starts on federal land can easily jump to private or state land and vice versa. So we count on the Forest Service, which is where the federal firefighting force largely comes from, to help us out and also to reimburse the state when the state fights fires on federal land. Our new state forester, Kacey KC, seems pretty confident that our federal partnerships will be executed well. She's been assured that the number of wildland firefighters in Oregon this summer will not be less than it was last year. Nationwide, it's about 5,700 firefighters that the federal agencies rely on, along with about 900 firefighters from tribal fire departments. So she seems confident. On the other hand, Oregon's congressional Democrats, Reps. Suzanne Bonamici and Andrea Salinas and Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, seemed less confident. They had gone to a wildfire briefing at the Northwest Interagency Fire Coordination Center in Portland, which works with nine states and their agencies and federal agencies to coordinate firefighting in the Northwest. They got the impression that while the firefighting force might be there, because there has been so much shaking up in the federal government through incentivized retirements, buyouts and cuts, there are serious gaps. Sen. Wyden said about 1,400 people from the Forest Service who were cut last year were also red card certified, meaning they're trained to respond to a fire. Those aren't your frontline firefighting ranks, but they are the people who would go out to a fire, say in the Wallowas, to coordinate communications from a hilltop between firefighters and the command center below. We've also seen cuts to the air quality monitoring office at the EPA, to atmospheric monitoring and other satellite logistics that NOAA and NASA provide. Those positions have been lost, cut, scaled back and defunded, and the congressional delegation raised real alarm that that type of support, which may sound ancillary but is actually critical, not only to stopping fires but to keeping firefighters safe, has been scaled back significantly. So that's the big concern.
Dunne: We're used to looking at the state with a bit of a geographic split, Eastern Oregon being drier and more prone to wildfire. Is there concern that one particular part of the state is riper for wildfire, or should we basically be looking at the entire state?
Baumhardt: I think on one hand, there is this desire to make sure everybody knows that wildfire risk is high no matter where you are. Realistically, Eastern Oregon is still going to be the focus, not least because we know from years of research that most fires happen in rangelands and grasslands. This has been a big deal in Idaho recently. There's been some great reporting by Boise State Public Radio about how that's literally impacting insurance rates for people in rangelands who might not have expected such high fire risk. We tend to think of wildfires as forest fires, but that just doesn't bear out. Year after year, the bulk of fires in the West happen on rangelands and grasslands. State Forester KC also made a good point about how precipitation changes the dynamics given Oregon's topography. In Eastern Oregon, with low snowpack and low rain, fire season will start earlier. But because there's been so little snowpack in the Cascades, you will likely see parts of Central Oregon and even west of the Cascades experience some fires at higher elevations, in areas you might have thought were insulated because they're close to snowpack that just hasn't accumulated this year.
Dunne: Alex, my last question for you: the governor talked about something called the Before You Burn app and how important it is. Talk a little about what that does and why it's becoming more important that people are aware of good fire safety practices on their property.
Baumhardt: Yeah, and to my discredit, and maybe to the discredit of the marketing folks at the state agencies, I had not heard of the app until it was brought up at this news conference. It was developed in coordination with federal and state agencies. The net-net is, you download it and register. If you are going to do a debris burn, or are planning one, you just go on the app and it will tell you what your local regulations are, what the rules are, and whether you are allowed to burn that day.
Dunne: Alex Baumhardt, senior reporter at The Oregon Capital Chronicle, friend of the show. Always appreciate you coming on and talking about the great articles you write.
Baumhardt: Oh, thanks so much, Michael. It's a pleasure, always.
Dunne: Kyra Buckley of OPB joins me now to paint the scene at Moda Center during the first game of Oregon's brand-new WNBA franchise. Kyra Buckley, OPB business reporter. Kyra, always great to have you on. Thanks so much for joining us.
Kyra Buckley: Thanks for having me.
Dunne: I'm kind of jealous because you got to go to the first game of the Portland Fire. Before I even ask you any questions, let's do this. You gave me some sound from the PA announcer and the crowd noise when the team was about to be introduced for the first time. Let's play that, and then on the other side I want to get your reaction. Here we go.
Crowd noise and PA announcer: "And now making their return to the NBA, please welcome to the court the Portland Fire!!!"
Dunne: Wow. I mean, that kind of gave me chills. You were there. What was the atmosphere like from your perspective?
Buckley: So that was the sound of 19,335 fans, which, by the way, was a sold-out Moda Center and the most fans ever to show up for an expansion team's home opener. It was pretty amazing. It was honestly just really emotional to watch the amount of support. It was so loud I could feel it through my whole body. And that energy was there for the entire game, even though the Fire did end up losing their first game. You wouldn't know it based on the crowd. Everybody was so excited and so engaged. I've been to a lot of pro basketball, women's basketball games, and I truly have never seen anything quite like it.
Dunne: Of course, nothing was normal about the road that led to this first game. Remind folks what the Fire had to do just to field a team, and talk about the incredibly compressed timeline they had to do it in.
Buckley: Normally an expansion team in the WNBA has about five to six months to put their roster together. During that same time, they're building fan excitement and experience, and normally they know who their big player is going to be. Well, the Portland Fire had about five to six weeks to do all of that, in part because of a huge win for WNBA players this season. They were in labor negotiations up until the last minute. There was a little fear that it might infringe on the season, but they did get those negotiations wrapped up, and that led to a transformational collective bargaining agreement where the players are going to get paid more and receive an increasing share of the revenue they help generate. That's really exciting for the league overall, but for the Portland Fire it really gave them just this short crunch time. So they ran their Expansion Draft about five weeks before tipoff, then did some trades, had the rookie draft and got to training camp. They'd really only had a couple of weeks together before playing their first official game.
Dunne: Wow. Well, you saw them play. Talk about the team and give us an idea of what kind of team it is. Is it a run-and-gun team? A great shooting team? A low-post team? What do you think their personality might become as the season goes along?
Buckley: First of all, it is still a young team. They have a couple of veterans, but a lot of players who are in their first three years in the WNBA. That also means they're quite energetic and quite fast, and they're very fun to watch. I think we are going to see an imperfect team that experiments with a lot of different personnel and plays. But one thing Head Coach Alex Sarama has really talked about is that they want to be known for their pressure and intensity. They want to make it hard for other teams to come play in Portland. They know they might not win a ton of games this season, but they want to put pressure on defense. They want to be pesky and in the face of other players, and they've all talked about feeding off crowd energy as part of that. I really think they're going to keep developing into a team that plays more cohesively. The first game was a little awkward at times. You could see they were still getting to know each other, which you'd expect. But I think we're going to see, as they keep playing, some pretty fierce defense and intense basketball, and hopefully some more creative plays.
Dunne: Of course, one blueprint is about 500 to 600 miles to the south. The Golden State Valkyries had success right away. But from who you've talked to and just being there, that's not the same expectation here, is it?
Buckley: No. First, let's just give a shout-out to the Valkyries. They set the bar so high for an expansion team. They had that five-to-six-month window to build their roster. They came in with a really strong head coach. They were ready to win, and they made the playoffs in their first season, also with a really strong fan base. Portland is definitely a little different. You hear the team leadership here, the coach and the general manager, really talking about creating a culture that is uplifting to women athletes. Part of that is a training process that's pretty novel. I don't fully understand the details, but the idea is to create a place where they can study women athletes and hopefully make the game safer, stronger and better, while also trying some new, creative basketball. So again, I think what we're going to see is some really fun games, but maybe not a lot of wins this season. I think the team will still be in a pretty positive place if they're able to work together and create the culture they want, or at least that's the sense I've gotten so far in this nascent season.
Dunne: You also talked to some players. I want to play a clip about how this team is bonding. It's from Sarah Ashley Barker. Let's listen.
Sarah Ashley Barker: "When we got good plays, we were all high-fiving and coming together in our timeouts and huddles. We really were just trying to give each other ideas and listen. And when you can have a team come together and build that chemistry on and off the court, it's really special to see what can happen on the floor, too. As long as we just stay together, we're going to have a really fun season."
Dunne: Hearing her words and thinking about how this team was rushed together, that kind of sounds like exactly the right mindset.
Buckley: Yeah, absolutely. I was really struck by how the players talked about getting to Portland and, even though some of them were longtime WNBA veterans and many are in their first few years, they're all new to Portland and all new to this team. Sarah Ashley Barker said that put them in a unique situation, and that she was surprised by how quickly they bonded and how they really supported each other on the floor. As a fan, it was fun to watch them uplift each other, even when they were down, even as it became clear they were going to lose the game. And I just want to give a shout-out to Barker. She came off the bench and scored 13 points in that game, so she clearly had something to prove to her teammates. I think she did that on the floor, and then she talked about how doing it off the court made that possible.
Dunne: You also talked to fans. I'm going to play a clip from a fan about the atmosphere of opening night. Let's take a listen.
Shelly Darcy: "We were down on the tunnel where the players were coming in and out, and they were signing little kids' jerseys and basketballs. And to see women come together like this and support each other. Magical."
Dunne: It's pretty obvious that people are jazzed about this team, right?
Buckley: Yeah. I had a chance to talk to Shelly Darcy, and she's actually a longtime Portland resident. The only time she didn't live in Portland was during the first iteration of the Portland Fire back in the early 2000s. She told me she's felt like she's been waiting so long to finally have professional women's basketball in her city. So feeling that atmosphere and the support for women's sports, yeah, when I talked to her she was totally glowing and really excited for the rest of the season.
Dunne: Kyra Buckley covers business for OPB and covers the WNBA like nobody else. Kyra, thank you again for coming on.
Buckley: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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, former Oregon football star Kayvon Thibodeaux joins us, not to talk about his play on the field, but about how he's traveling the country educating football players about the financial decisions they'll face off the field. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon on the Record. Thanks for listening.
