By July, Eastern Oregon and almost all of Washington will likely be at “above average risk for large, costly fires,” one of the Northwest’s leading fire forecasters said Wednesday.
The summer is shaping to be hot, said John Saltenberger, lead meteorologist at the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center, which streamlines wildfire response in the region. The temperature and precipitation outlook for fire season is “eerily similar” to 2024, a year when a record 1.9 million acres across Oregon burned, racking up more than $350 million in firefighting bills and damaged nearly 200 homes.
State and federal fire officials briefed Oregon’s U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden and journalists about the wildfire outlook and their preparation for the coming season. They generally presented a positive front, emphasizing their collaborative relationships.
But lurking over the fire forecast is a cloud of uncertainty about how much money or resources the state and federal governments will allocate for future fire fights. The Trump administration earlier this year held up some federal funding for wildfire mitigation and academics worry that federal turmoil could threaten wildfire response.
Oregon’s wildfire funding outlook is better than in neighboring Washington, where lawmakers proposed cutting wildfire funding to correct a deficit. But Oregon lawmakers still have no cohesive plan to fund a proposed bump for wildfire mitigation and response.
Wyden said Wednesday that he’s attempting to strengthen his legislative proposals encouraging the use of prescribed burns to reduce hazardous fuels and prevent out-of-control wildfires. He will also lean on Oregon lawmakers to find more state money to support wildland fire fighting, he told The Oregonian/OregonLive.
“Today ought to be a wake up call,” Wyden said, nodding to Saltenberger’s forecast. “It ought to be a priority in rural Oregon, from now through the fire season, to get the resources to be able to protect people.”
Gov. Tina Kotek told lawmakers before the start of the 2025 legislative session that she wanted them to find nearly $300 million to prevent and fight wildfires. But halfway through the six-month session, lawmakers have yet to coalesce around a concrete plan.
Six funding options proposed by a wildfire funding workgroup are still circulating in several different bills. Some lawmakers are adamant that Oregon needs to find new funding streams to pay for wildfire instead of just tapping into general funds. Others are opposed to the idea of asking Oregonians for more money and think the state could redirect existing funds or draw on reserves to foot the bill.
Kotek has been clear with lawmakers, she told journalists earlier this month: “Do not leave the session without new money to work on this issue.”
“If I have to get involved, I will by the end of session,” she added. “We definitely have to have some more funding.”
While state fire leaders wait to see whether Oregon lawmakers will come up with a more stable wildfire funding strategy for the future, their preparation for the 2025 fire season is already underway using money allocated for the current biennium and government grants.
The Oregon Department of Forestry is working on landscape mitigation and leaning into a prescribed fire program, said Kyle Williams, who manages fire operations. The agency also plans to add more air support to its firefighting efforts in the 2025 season, and plans to send some of those choppers to cover the Northwest corner of the state.
Travis Medema, chief deputy state fire marshal, said the structural fire service has loaned out 76 firefighting engines to communities around the state and is using state funds to administer staffing grants that help hundreds of local jurisdictions hire extra firefighters during the summer season.
“Having the tools and having the people as we look at these rapidly escalating fire seasons has been very successful,” Medema said.
Agency leaders were worried about how a grueling 2024 fire season would impact staffing this year, but they’ve seen first responders return, said Williams, the deputy state forester.
“The trauma bond that comes from the season that those folks experience really galvanized them to want to come back and protect Oregonians the way they’re called to do it,” he said.
Shane Jeffries, who coordinates regional fire response for the U.S. Forest Service, said the agency is expecting to hire about 2,000 firefighters in Oregon and Washington this year, which is on track with its hiring in the past.
“We feel pretty good about our core firefighting force,” he said.
But about 500 Forest Service employees opted into a “deferred resignation” program offered by the Trump administration in an effort to downsize the federal workforce, Jeffries said. Many of those employees were in some way related to fire operations, from purchasing to helping with the 40 “complex incident management” teams that respond to large-scale disasters. The agency is still trying to come to grips with the impact of those resignations, Jeffries said.
State and local fire agencies that work together at the interagency coordination center are leaning on each other to fill in the gaps, he said.
“‘Hey, what can we do to help one another?’ That’s been a lot of the conversation that we’ve been having,” Jeffries said. “I know it will continue as we move closer and closer to the summer and the peak fire season here in the west.”
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