NW wildfire season made worse by Covid-19 pandemic

Washington State was expected to get hit with the worst fire season in the nation this year. Now, the pandemic may be complicating things.

State Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz joined KUOW's Angela King for an update.

Angela King: Fire crews have had to change how they operate because of the pandemic. How effective do you think those changes have been at keeping our firefighters healthy?

Hilary Franz: You know, this is one of those situations where every single year we prepare for the worst and hope for the best. And number one priority is taking care of our firefighters and our community and making sure they're safe. There is no manual on how to protect and fight fires in the midst of a global pandemic. We put in measures and protocols to try to protect them and do everything we can. Everything from daily screening to wearing masks when they're in the camps to reducing the number of people we have on our helicopters and firefighters in our engines. They can't wear those masks on the line because they're flammable. But we are taking all the precautions we can.

We have already had exposure to COVID. We've had two firefighters test positive. The first one, we were actually fortunate that firefighter hadn't really reported to duty yet. They had been, obviously, preparing for fire. So, the interaction with the other members of the crew was not significant. I think that was around May. It was just this last weekend that the second one tested positive. He had been working within a crew of about seven other firefighters. So we've had to quarantine those other seven and take them off for 14 days.

What people should realize is it's a really tough situation that the firefighters are in and it's very difficult for them to follow the typical six-foot social distancing rule because that's not how you fight fires. And on top of that, when one of them tests positive, anyone that they were interacting with now has to be put on leave for 14 days to quarantine. Our hope is that people are going to take all precautions to prevent these fires happening. I think the most significant message we can send is 90 percent of our fires are caused by the public.

King: You know, lots of people are having to stay home right now because of the pandemic. How do you think that's affecting the fire season?

Franz: We're seeing a significant impact of people staying home. A significant number of the fires have started from debris piles. We've had 187 burn piles, which if you look at the 10-year average is way up there. And part of what we see is happening is people are staying home, they're following the rules to stay home and stay safe, they're getting out in their yard and they're doing that yard work. But then they are creating these debris piles that then they start burning, and it gets away, and now we have a fire that is significant.

King: Our drought situation is much better than it was the same time last year. But we've also seen some recent red flag conditions. What risk do you see in the coming months?

Franz: We are, right now, cautiously optimistic that it is not going to be as bad a fire season as we predicted and as the national weather reports were predicting. It's always the case when we have hot dry conditions and we enter into August and September which are hotter, drier times that we could have a significant fire that takes hold and is very hard to put out.