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Central Washington Residents Take Stock Of Worst Fire Season In State History

Courtney Flatt
/
Earthfix

2015 was the worst wildfire season in Washington state history: three young firefighters died and hundreds of homes burned in blazes that sent more than a million acres up in smoke. For residents of central Washington, a recent gathering offered the first chance to come together and ponder the future in a region likely to see more and bigger fires in years to come.

The summer of 2015 was the worst wildfire season in Washington state history: three young firefighters died and hundreds of homes burned in blazes that sent more than a million acres up in smoke. For residents of central Washington, a gathering on Monday offered the first chance to come together and ponder the future in a region likely to see more and bigger fires in years to come. Experts, policymakers, and elected officials from around the state came together in Wenatchee to speak at a summit called “Wildfires and Us.”
“We don’t have to be victims of fire,” said Rufus Woods, publisher of the Wenatchee World newspaper, in his opening remarks. “We can, if we’re smart enough, take control of our own destiny.”
According to Paul Hessburg, the first question to answer in that quest is simply, “How did we get here?” Hessburg, a research ecologist with the US Forest Service, used cartoonish, animated slides to walk the audience through thousands of years of fire history in the West. First, lightning strikes, followed by Native American hunting techniques, and finally, the Big Burn of 1910.
Today, Hessburg argued Washington forests are unnaturally dense, thickets of young trees that are the product of excessive logging and and a policy of putting out every fire on the landscape. “Consequently, today’s wildfires burn hotter and larger than most historical fires,” he said.
In that view, the driving force behind destructive fires is the buildup of fuels like brush and dead trees. But one of Hessburg’s colleagues, research forester Dave Calkin, offered a more complicated picture. Calkin dissected a 2010 fire in Boulder, Colorado to show that climate conditions, like hot, dry weather and driving winds, are often far more important than fuels and fire intensity.
As he explained, Landowners in the path of the Fourmile Canyon fire had spent a million dollars cutting brush and trees to reduce the risk of a high-intensity burn. But when the Fourmile Canyon fire approached on a day with high winds and 7% humidity, “Essentially, the fuel treatments didn’t look like they had been there,” Calkin said.
In fact, Calkin said the vast majority of homes that burned were destroyed by so-called ‘surface fires’—low intensity fires that move along the ground--just the kind of burns land managers hope to encourage.
Hessburg and Calkin did agree on one important factor, though: “People are moving into the woods by the millions,” Hessburg said. Both men agreed that fires are an inevitable part of life in the West. To change their impact, we may need to focus on the other part of the equation: people.
After the event, the audience lingered at a reception with booths staffed by insurers and advocates for fire-wise communities. Looking around, Dagmar Dever, of Alta Lake, said “There’s a lot of money spent here to teach people how to make their homes and surrounding areas more fire-resistant, but they’re too complacent.”
Devere said her outlook on wildfire was turned on its head when she lost her home in the 2014 Carlton Complex fires. She rebuilt with fire-resistant materials, and put sprinklers on the roof when fires drew near again last summer. But many of her neighbors didn’t seem to get the message. “I’m trying to find a way to get our little community to step up, somehow,” Devere said, “because I want to live where we bought our house”--and that means living with fire.
 

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