Expert Testifies: 'We Haven't Seen A Really Bad Wildfire Season Yet'

Senator Maria Cantwell is trying to build bipartisan support for what she’s calling the Wildfire Management Act of 2015. The bill would change the way we fight fires and secure more dependable funds for fire prevention. At a public hearing this week, she heard testimony from fire experts.

TRANSCRIPT

There was one moment that stood out, at the hearing. Dr. Michael Medler, of Western Washington University, was talking about the fires we’ve seen over the last few years. What he said about those fires made everyone look up.

Medler: “We haven’t seen a really bad fire season yet.”

Wait. We haven’t seen a really bad fire season yet? The current fire season is the worst in the history of the state.

Medler has made a career of studying fires. Later, he explained he hoped his comment didn’t diminish the losses people experienced this year. But —

Medler: “If trends continue — if this interaction between climate change, fuels build-up, and building communities deeper and deeper into these sorts of flammable landscapes continues, instead of counting homes burned in the hundreds, we could be counting them in the tens of thousands. And those are the kinds of fires that keep me up and night.”

Medler said that kind of fire is possible because our urban areas mix so freely with our forested areas.

If we want to avoid that kind of urban conflagration, he advised Senator Cantwell to take inspiration from the city of Boulder, Colorado. They have a quarter mile wide buffer zone around the city where the forest is intensely managed. It’s full of parks, bike trails, fishing ponds, stuff like that. They do controlled burns there once in a while. But what’s really unusual is what happens just before Christmas.

Medler: “They let the community come out, and they come out by the tens of thousands to harvest Christmas trees. So as a fuels management project, they let the community come out and do the thinning for them. This is the kind of community interaction that can make a city like Boulder far more resilient to fire as it rolls into that area.”

Programs like that are expensive, but Senator Maria Cantwell says they’re cheaper than the alternative.

Cantwell: “We’re spending a lot more now because of the cost of basically fighting the forest and the damage they do. So if we can get that ounce of prevention now and reduce the risk, we will be saving more money over the long run.”

Cantwell hopes to pass a bill before the next fire season that would dedicate more money to fire prevention programs. It would also build up the fire fighting force so they could surge quickly to stamp out fires before they get big.