Northwest now is supported in part by viewers like you.

Thank you.

I've been covering wildfire and the result of wildfire for 40 years.

Talking with dozens of experts about climate, drought, fuels and the continued development in what's called the wildland urban interface.

I mentioned this not as some sort of a weird exercise in bragging, but to tell you that the horrible fires of the past were always described as a preview to what was coming in the future.

While there's a lot we don't know.

I feel confident in saying that we're in that future right now.

The period of time all those experts and experiences have been warning us about for decades.

Mega fires have burned for centuries, but now we live and work in what used to be the middle of nowhere, and fuels management just hasn't kept up.

In Washington, the twist and Malden fires got our attention.

And here on the West Side in recent years, places like Bonney Lake, Sumner and Spanaway all got spooked.

Small examples hinting at our vulnerability to the kinds of firestorms that are now a clear and present threat.

With the forecast maps from the National Interagency Fire Center showing a lot of red all over our map.

Just about every summer, I recently traveled to Spokane County, where more than 300 homes were lost in the Gray and Oregon Road fires back in 2023.

They provide a preview of the kinds of extreme weather conditions and the unpredictable fire behavior.

That's almost certainly marching west.

It was August 18th of 2023 when the Great Fire broke out near Medical Lake, Washington with a 20 degree temperature gradient between colliding hot and cold air masses.

Low humidity, high winds and drought.

Everybody knew something bad was coming.

Now there was a firestorm in the Spokane area in 1991 that scared the hell out of everybody.

But by that fateful August day in 2023, when a faulty power company light sparked gray fire as compared to maybe the historical fire occurrence in Spokane County, we see that we've often had fires of the the same size and same footprint.

what was different with gray fires is that there was a community in the fire vector, or the direct path of that fire.

.

So when you summarize all the things going wrong on that day, the gray fire broke out.

I mean, literally every card you had on the table drew every bad card that day.

We did.

We did right from a from a fire behavior standpoint as far as where we would not want a fire to occur that day.

That's that's where the point of ignition was for the great fire.

It was on a south aspect.

Dry fuels lined with the wind.

It had it had everything it needed to move quickly.

Slope when topography fuels.

it was you saw the potential for loss of life with this immediately.

Most consider it a miracle that only one person died.

Dry, cold fronts have always been the threat in Spokane, but all the new housing built in pine covered grassland, meant that, like so many modern day firestorms, despite all the mutual aid and more than 100 apparatus on the job, the Great Fire was pretty much unforgettable.

Glowing embers blew down wind instantly torching trees and dry forests and sent walls of flame.

Racing house to house along the shores of places like Silver Lake.

that's one of the things that when when the community thinks of wildfire that is different these days, that that homes are really just another fuel type.

Right?

And they can they can burn and they burn with a lot more intensity typically than the wildfire does.

And so as one home burns the home adjacent to it, right.

Those exposures next to it, the radiant heat is just incredible.

And it can start to go home to home to home.

Two years later, most of the homes around Silver Lake are rebuilt, but not all.

And I, I think when I really lost it was when Isaac called and he went from, you know, I get off early to I don't know what to do.

I don't know what to do.

Mom, I can't see, I can't see I'm by the school and I can't go anywhere.

And we're like, turn around.

But the dogs, the dogs.

Or we can do about the dogs.

And it's like I said, baby, I said, don't fall asleep there, you know?

And then they'll pass.

And of course, I don't even want to hear that.

Don't talk like that.

And, yeah, I get a little emotional thinking about it now.

It looked like a war zone.

There were still propane tanks going off.

Things were on fire.

You didn't know where you could walk and walk, and you're trying to process where you were on top of it, right?

Because everything's gone.

You're used to trees and, and and your homes as landmarks and your brain is having a hard time processing what it's seeing.

A few keepsakes that survived the fire are dotted around the Stevens home.

Some even built into the dining room table.

But the loss is palpable, and it could have been so much worse.

buffer firebreaks plowed right through town.

The City of Medical Lake was just about lost.

Terry Cooper is finishing up her first term as mayor.

Knowing what you knew and what you guys thought you knew and where you've come.

What's your message to the West Side?

My message to the entire state is that we're all in jeopardy.

It's not.

If it's win, it's coming.

Fires in western Washington or increasing.

It's just about the same right there in eastern Washington.

We just have more of them in eastern Washington.

And so we need to come together.

We need to consider wildfires as a disaster season, just like hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, those kinds of things.

We need to have a funding mechanism.

We have money in reserves.

And we're going to have to be able to roll those out day one, because recovery starts day one.

We have a fantastic response network.

What we don't have is an incredible recovery process.

So we need to come up with a comprehensive recovery process because that takes years.

We got all the funding mechanisms, but it is so hard to get those dollars to people.

That's what I found.

And, having to work with the government and realize that this is a different kind of animal.

And, how do you get the dollars to the people?

Cooper says Medical Lake now keeps 10% of its budget in a disaster reserve fund, and she supports legislation to speed recovery dollars to individuals and to do things like remove the state sales tax on items used for recovery.

But in reality, she says, the government's ability to help after an emergency is going to be increasingly limited.

there are so many companies in so many circumstances.

Generally speaking, what's your impression of how things went with private insurance?

So private insurance people were not prepared?

They had not kept up with the property, you know, increases that had happened, property value increases.

So that started back with Covid when there was a mass exodus from the west side to the east side.

And then housing became, critically short.

My values just went through the roof, and within 2 or 3 years they've doubled in value.

And then on top of that, supply chains had been you know, impacted, cost of labor had doubled, cost of materials had doubled.

And so not we were not in a good position for, for losing everything and building back even the best, the most insured, you know, well insured people struggled there.

Yeah.

I think your comments are very well so that brings me to the question.

When you're speaking to people in Western Washington, I think they know in their minds that a horrible wildfire could happen on the West Side.

I'm not sure they know it in their hearts.

as we put more and more people out into that wildland environment, be it homes or recreation or other opportunities, we see an increased number of fire starts.

And so when you combine that with the climatological conditions, we know our seasons are longer, hotter, drier.

We know we're an extended drought in a lot of places.

We know that snowpack is coming off quicker like this year.

Western Washington's, 33 days ahead of normal in a lot of areas.

So we see all these ingredients in place for large catastrophic wildfire.

And hey, we got more work to do with our fire education and outreach to not create fear mongering, but create an understanding that wildfire is not a question of if.

It's a question of when.

And there's a lot we can do about it.

So we certainly saw when we look back, hey, defensible space works.

Home hardening works.

Knowing your ingress egress, during a wildfire that works.

Knowing knowing what your neighbors up to.

Maybe your neighbor's elderly and needs help evacuating.

Having a plan in place before the emergency.

We know all those things work, but we found a lot of our community members unprepared during the moment, and the time to plan for a wildfire is not during the wildfire.

It's before it happens.

2024 was the first year in history where there were more fires west of the Cascades.

And that trend is likely to continue with so many people now living in the West Side's wildland urban interface.

It was the Okanagan Fire Complex in 2015 that really changed the public's attitude about wildfire in Washington state.

That's when three firefighters were killed.

Near twist, 120 homes were destroyed and 300,000 acres burned.

The Labor Day fires in 2020 were also devastating in Washington, The following year, lawmakers passed House Bill 1168, packed with hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for wildfire response.

Forest health and community resilience efforts.

as Steve Higgins tells us now, all the progress that was made, funding a wave of forest management and increased firefighting resources is now unwinding, most likely at just the wrong time.

summer has been the burning fire that took just a handful of days to scorch more than 10,000 acres.

Here we are.

You can see the telltale signs of this wildfire along the Columbia River Gorge.

You've got blackened trees and scorched earth.

You see, smoke is still rising.

We've got firefighters responding locally, regionally, and even from beyond to ensure that the fire is contained to the lines that they've built to protect structures and property.

Firefighters swarmed in a quick attack, county rushing to douse flames that threatened hundreds of buildings and homes in southwest Washington.

So.

But it's scary.

Homeowner Dolley Wade lives in White Salmon and across the street from Hinkle Middle School.

That's where a makeshift command center was stood up managing, fighting the burning fire.

Well, there's enough space to house nearly 900 firefighters camped out in tents spread out across the campus.

Mother nature, you never know what she's going to do.

But it's scary when you know these people personally.

But look what we have.

That's beautiful.

The burning fire ignited July 18th.

The cause remains under investigation.

But weather and geography help the blaze spread quickly, making this fire one of the largest among Washington's 2025 wildfire season.

Because of the topography, the fuels and the weather, it ran very quickly.

Like I. More wildfire threatened homes and property in 2025, like the junior Vail fire sparked in early July in Mason County, where it threatened 50 homes.

Homeowner Christian Burns watched the smoke rise and firefighters stream into his community to protect his neighborhood.

Yeah, it was concerning.

It's been concerning the entire time, to a degree, but I don't think that we had the same concern that some of our other neighbors did.

Us firefighters from the Washington Department of Natural Resources and contractors took weeks to get the tutorial fire under control, preventing any homes from going up in flames.

These guys crushed it.

They knocked it out of the park.

Not far away along the Hood Canal.

Firefighters swarmed the Bear Gulch fire along the shores of Lake Cushman.

What started in the first few days of July spread to more than 4000 acres a month later.

Firefighters battled on the ground and from the air.

Scrambling to protect infrastructure near the staircase Rapids along the North Fork Skokomish River.

The cause of the bear fire is yet to be revealed.

So too is the final bill detailing the full price, paying for air response and firefighters labor in 2025.

The Washington State Legislature faced a budget crunch.

Lawmakers slashed funds earmarked for wildfire response to less than half compared to previous years, approving only $60 million this biennium.

Commissioner of Public Lands Dave at The Grove spelled out the critical difference state dollars make helping communities prepare for wildfire.

We also have invested, half $1 million in recent years, creating fire lines around white salmon fuels, reduction in firebreaks.

And this prevention and preparedness funding keeps us safe.

It's a core function of government public safety.

And, we're going to be okay this year with wildfire response, but due to some painful cuts from the state legislature.

If next year's supplemental budget does not restore some of that funding, we're going to see more fires like this, and they're going to be larger, and they're going to cost the taxpayers a lot more money in the back end up.

The Grove joined governor Bob Ferguson and White Salmon in late July, detailing the progress made fighting the burning fire and highlighting the need for state resources.

But this is a reminder, Dave said, of the need for those resources and and they're truly making a big difference right now, as we understand it, from the experts here on the ground.

State resources aren't the only cuts firefighters must deal with, but support from the federal level also trickles down, impacting Washington's ability to fight and prepare for wildfire.

Let me go into this.

Recently, Senator Patty Murray grilled United States Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz during a Senate subcommittee hearing asking him to gauge the impact of sweeping federal job cuts that eliminated thousands of positions across the country.

When it comes to the fire pit, specifically, we had, I think I mentioned earlier, about 1400 people that had fire calls that did leave.

And we have reached out to those folks to secure their services this fire season to see if they want to come back on a voluntary basis to to function on their.

It's this seems really ridiculous that it was done this week, which was my question actually.

Was there an analysis done before this was done to realize the impacts of these people that you're now trying to find and bring back?

Senator, so we couldn't do the analysis, so we didn't know who was going to leave because it was voluntary, right?

We did.

We didn't we didn't go handpicked.

Well, I, I want to get on, but I just said the stakes are life and death here.

And this is really raises serious alarms about, this agency being ready for this critical fire season.

United States Forest Service insists it has the staff and support personnel ready and able to respond effectively for this year's fire season, but Washington Senator Patty Murray insisted the slashed jobs cuts deeper than we yet fully understand.

Warning in an early May media conference that critically trained first responders were let go during reduction in forced buyouts.

And remember, Trump has also said he wants to eliminate FEMA entirely, and he has already denied one emergency declaration for Washington state for recovery from the bomb cyclone storm that struck our communities in November.

Trump is not just cutting the work to prevent fires, but the work to rebuild after disaster.

We have to get loud about this, and that is why I put this call together.

In her media conference, Senator Murray blasted President Trump's administration's budget freezes and job cuts, saying they hampered training and evaporated institutional knowledge.

Chaos has been created through actions currently at the federal level.

The biggest thing to focus on for us has been what that impact is going to look like for local agencies in their firefighting efforts, and how their communities are going to be burdened with the reduction in resources.

McClain Black Lake Fire Department Chief Leonard Johnson joined Murray's media brief.

He's been fighting fires in Washington state for decades.

He started his career in the Moses Lake area.

Since I've been in western Washington.

I've watched progressively, over the summers, at least in the last ten years, that they've lengthened out.

Johnson is also the commander with the Southeast Washington Type three Incident Management team, which for a time had the response on the predawn fire.

He warns we may not know the full impact of mass federal layoffs on wildfire preparedness and response until the damage has been done.

I hope that they find a pathway forward that keeps all the essential programs in place.

I mean, I believe in making things efficient, but not at the sacrifice of the impact at the local level, where there's essential programs that are literally on the line right now that we may not have in the future, that will impact how successful we are at doing our jobs, managing our forests and paying for wildfire response comes at a price.

We end up having to pay sooner or later.

Chief Johnson hopes the bill is something everyone is comfortable paying, and other pieces, like NASA right now, is working with the wildfire community on satellite systems and all those types of things.

So all those federal programs that we see getting impacted with dollars reduction in people, they they have downstream effects about how they impact the local level, about what information is available.

How soon can we predict and warn communities about an approaching incident?

It's all extremely integrated.

Reporting from Klickitat and Mason counties.

Steve Higgins, northwest now.

We all know that the big fire threat in western Washington comes with east winds.

Climate change may actually reduce the frequency of east winds.

But the problem is that there's so much more fuel now.

Air quality can also take a big hit, too.

If you remember the smoke storm of 2020, when we had some of the worst air quality in the world.

The overarching theme driving all of this is climate.

Droughts are worse and longer, summers drier and hotter, and then add more fuels, more people into the wildland urban interface.

And as Philip Townsend shows us now, landowners are having to put risk management for fire into their land management plans.

Around the planet.

The Earth is warming different rates in different places, but it's one of the key things that we see driving the big increase in wildfires, particularly in the western U.S.. Reason why that warming is important is because you think about something like a wildfire season that historically occurred even before climate change.

But now as that climate is warming, it's not only is it making it even warmer during the summertime, but it's also elongating the fire season.

So on average, globally, there's been about a two week increase in the fire season of fires starting earlier and fires going out later globally.

And again, that's variable around around different parts of the planet.

The data show that there's been about a tripling in forest area burned in the western U.S.

over the last four decades.

You need hot, dry conditions.

You need an ignition on the landscape, and you need burnable fuel.

Climate warming, an increase in temperatures is essentially loading the dice in favor of those ingredients, lining up in different places more often than they would have before recent warming.

So up until recently, more than 99.9% of area burned in Washington had been on the east side of the Cascades from about the early 1980s up until about 2020.

And in 2020, we saw some big fires on the west side of the Cascades.

And now that balance has shifted a little bit.

But still, the lion's share of area burned every year is in the east part of the state, on the east side of the Cascade Crest, simply because it's warmer, drier there.

And the ingredients lining up for fire fuels, ignitions and weather.

Climate conditions conducive for fire are more likely to occur on the east side of the Cascades than on the west side of the Cascades.

We've changed the role that fire has played, and some ecosystems are in peril because they're now experiencing fire that's different than it was historically, where you would have had a forest that might have experienced fire every few years, two decades, and all that fuel would have been removed.

You might have missed no, half a dozen, a dozen more fires over that last 100, 850 years.

And some of those areas in which, with each one of those fires that you've missed, you've now added to that fuel debt that is now growing in these forests.

So now some of those forests are really primed for very hot, very intense, and fairly destructive ecologically as well as societally fires when they occur because they're uncharacteristically burning at high severity levels.

Now there's an opportunity to go in and remove some of that fuel and essentially do some of the work that wildfire otherwise would have been doing over the last 100 hundred and 50 years.

Because as more and more trees got bigger and bigger and they started competing for resources, the growth rings got tighter and tighter and tighter.

Then you can barely even count the growth rings so tight.

That stuff is.

We have been managing Swamp Lake, for a variety of purposes.

It's been a lot of planning for forest health, wildfire, wildlife habitat.

We've been designing for the last couple of years, some timber harvesting, and then wildlife enhancements and reforestation activities to really just help the property move from a overstocked, stagnant, fire prone stand into a healthy, vigorous forest that can help support more wildlife on on the on the site.

So it's been pretty fun.

Project.

The problems that we saw before we really started working were overstocking, very frankly, limited wildlife usage because there was there's nothing growing on the ground.

There was no sunlight coming through the canopy because trees can't get that big if they're all packed in close together.

There's too many trees.

They're stressed from drought, insects are getting into them.

There's root disease.

So we came up with a plan to leave the largest trees per acre.

And so we wanted to leave those nice, healthy trees on site and actually be able to utilize the newly freed up resources water, nutrients in the soil, sunlight, all of that.

So it did exactly what it was supposed to.

You open the stand up, you leave the areas with the water and the riparian vegetation, but the upland areas have more food and more critters show up.

And then you put a camera in there and then, lo and behold, there's a whole bunch of elk and deer and bear running around.

Know the work that we did on Fort Terry's land is absolutely going to help reduce the risk of stand replacement fire on the property.

We have substantial separation between the forest floor and the canopies.

So there's there's a lot less ladder fuels, there's a lot less sub canopy trees leading directly from the forest floor all the way up to the canopy.

So if a fire was to occur, we are going to have a lot better chance at keeping that fire on the ground and not getting up into the canopies, which actually is going to end up killing the trees.

And that's why we're really trying to do this work, is to get ahead of things.

Let's be proactive and go manage this stuff and take care of it and give it the best chance possible.

We should be playing offense and trying to be ready for these things, and be proactive with the lands you're entrusted to manage.

Music I think it's safe to say that generally speaking, government is pulling back.

That means the cost burden, especially for prevention and recovery, is increasingly shifting to individual property owners, just as climate change is compounding the risks.

The time to plan is right now.

Go to the internet to take a look at DNR wildfire ready neighbors Firewise USA is also a great resource, as is the era of Mega fires.com.

Your local conservation and fire districts can really help you evaluate things to the bottom line.

Make a plan, check your insurance and be sure your home is hardened for a wildfire.

We all have to get our minds around the idea that catastrophic mega fires are now a possibility here in Western Washington.

As always, I hope this program got you thinking and talking.

I'm Tom Layson.

Thanks for watching northwest.

Now.