Washington’s extreme fire season begins to wind down

On the Three Queens fire near Snoqualmie Pass, Matt Dehr, a state wildfire meteorologist, said the lichen and mosses were so crisp this summer an ember thrown by wind could spark a fire a mile away.

“It was like a hairpin trigger,” Dehr said.

This was true of fires across the state, including the Little Giant fire, burning through Chiwawa River drainage and around Lake Chelan, and the Sinlahekin fire burning in Northeast Washington. “It did not take much to get fire going and spreading rapidly beyond what we can contain as firefighters on the landscape,” he said.

These conditions, marked by extended drought, abundant dry grasses and brush, and heat and wind, wrought a devastating fire season in the Northwest and in Washington, where 12 large fires continue to burn. More than 900,000 acres, or 1,400 square miles (an area larger than Rhode Island), have burned across the state so far, second only to the 2015 wildfire season.

Late-summer rain showers have slowed but not ended the fire season, according to the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center. Above-average temperatures and drying are in the forecast through the end of September, and fire danger will likely stick around through the beginning of October. But fire season is definitely on a downward trend, Dehr said.

At least two people died and hundreds of homes were lost in the fires, three of which grew to more than 150 square miles. Tens of thousands of people were forced to evacuate. Millions of acres burned in Oregon, which has seen a record-breaking year.

Fires across the Northwest were highly resistant to typical firefighting methods used to limit their spread and suppress the flames, requiring additional crews, expenses and extended firefighting, according to the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center.

A trio of Spokane blazes would become the worst disaster in recent memory and rise to the top priority in the nation. The U.S. spent weeks at the highest preparedness level, meaning the maximum number of crews, aircraft and fire leadership teams were deployed across fires. Help came from as far as New Zealand and Australia. Firefighters bounced from fire to fire with little rest.

With record-low snowpack across much of the Cascades, an unprecedented fourth consecutive year of drought in Washington and critically dry soils, grasses and shrubs, the landscape was primed for fire and the Northwest charged into this fire season ahead of schedule. In mid-June, a wildfire outside of Spokane killed a woman and claimed more than a dozen homes.

Fire season kicked into high gear in mid-July, with dozens of new large fires ignited by lightning, Dehr said. Lightning ignitions occur every year, but not every year do so many of those ignitions become large fires.

“We're sitting there in April and May and we're just thinking: It can't be as bad as we think it's going to be, right?” Dehr said. “And it turns out it was.”

Blazes sparked in the Oregon alpine — areas typically still holding snow — in early July.

For millennia, Native people managed Northwest landscapes with fires lit by hand. After a century of effective policies of fire suppression, Mother Nature is coming to collect on that fire debt, said Cody Desautel, executive director of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.

Meanwhile, climate warming is turning snow to rain. Summers are starting earlier, becoming hotter and drier. One snowpack monitoring site tracked by Colville scientists typically records 6 to 8 feet of snow each winter. But by mid-February it had seen only inches, Desautel said, and conditions didn’t improve.

More than a million of the reservation’s 1.4 million acres have burned since 2014, he said. About 200,000 of those acres burned this year. Dozens of homes were lost.

“We should be doing more forest management. We should be doing more prescribed fire and fuels work,” he said. The work has been ongoing, and has in some areas reduced the impacts of fire on communities and forests. To expand these practices takes time and funding, Desautel said, “and we don't have an abundance of either of those two things.”

In ecosystems and landscapes adapted to fire, such as ponderosa pine forest in Eastern Washington, fire is not a matter of if but when, said Brian Harvey, a University of Washington professor of forest fire ecology.

This landscape has experienced a big fire deficit from the exclusion and suppression of fires that would have otherwise been occurring, Harvey said. Now those fires can be more damaging than the low-intensity fires they adapted to, he said, and much more dangerous.

From the early 1980s to the turn of the century, there was one year that exceeded 6 million acres burned across the U.S., Harvey said. Since the year 2000, this year will mark the 16th year that has exceeded 6 million acres burned.

Then this year, Harvey said, ingredients were all lining up in the spring for a big fire season. The Cascades saw record-low snowpack, with some basins at about a third to two-thirds of normal by April 1. A warm winter gave rise to a strong grass crop that dried and became fuel for fire weeks earlier than average. By mid‑May, conditions resembled those of late June.

“We're essentially loading the dice for them to all come up with (a higher) probability of fire,” Harvey said.

Fire remains an important source of renewal and resilience in these ecosystems, he said. There's not really any way to realistically get rid of fire or make it go away, Harvey said, but it will be important for the region to continue to build on efforts to adapt to more active fire seasons, and work with fire wherever possible.

The state is today equipped with far more firefighters, aircraft and other equipment to throw at fires than it was just eight years ago, said George Geissler, the state forester. Before the season begins, the state has had more funding (while challenging to sustain) for preventive work with communities and other land managers.

“But it's hard to sit here and go, ‘Man, this has been an amazing success,’ ” Geissler said, “when I lost hundreds of homes over here, or we had firefighters” killed across the country.

The devastation in Spokane represented the largest number of homes lost in a fire in Washington, he said.

“This was one of the most challenging seasons that we faced,” he said.

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