OREGON
8A — THE OBSERVER
‘Nothing looks good’ preparing
for this summer’s wildfi re season
By ANDREW SELSKY
The Associated Press
BEND — Wearing soot-
smudged, fi re-resistant
clothing and helmets, sev-
eral wildland fi refi ghters
armed with hoes moved
through a stand of pon-
derosa pines as fl ames tore
through the underbrush.
The fi refi ghters weren’t
there to extinguish the fi re.
They had started it.
The prescribed burn,
ignited this month near the
scenic mountain town of
Bend, is part of a massive
eff ort in wildlands across
the U.S. West to prepare for
a fi re season that’s expected
to be even worse than last
year’s record-shattering one.
The U.S. Forest Ser-
vice and the Bureau of Land
Management have thinned
by hand, machines and pre-
scribed burns about 1.8
million acres of forest and
brushland since last season,
offi cials from the agencies
told The Associated Press.
They typically treat some 3
million acres every year.
All that activity, though,
has barely scratched the sur-
face. The federal govern-
ment owns roughly 640 mil-
lion acres in the U.S. All
but 4% of it lies in the West,
including Alaska, with some
of it unsuitable for pre-
scribed burning.
“All these steps are in the
right direction, but the chal-
lenge is big and complex,”
said John Bailey, professor
of silviculture and fi re man-
agement at Oregon State
University. “And more needs
to be done to even turn the
corner.”
The eff orts face a conver-
gence of bleak forces.
‘ON A SCALE OF 1 TO 10,
I’M A 12’
Severe drought has
turned forests and grass-
lands into dry fuels, ready
to ignite from a careless
camper or a lightning strike.
More people are building in
areas bordering wildlands,
expanding the so-called
wildland-urban interface, an
area where wildfi res impact
people the most. Invasive,
highly fl ammable vegetation
is spreading uncontrolled
across the West.
“I’m seeing probably the
worst combination of con-
ditions in my lifetime,” said
Derrick DeGroot, a county
commissioner in southern
Oregon’s Klamath County.
“We have an enormous fuel
load in the forests, and we
are looking at a drought
unlike we’ve seen probably
in the last 115 years.”
Asked how worried he is
about the 2021 fi re season,
DeGroot said: “On a scale
of 1 to 10, I’m a 12. Nothing
looks good.”
In other prevention mea-
sures in the West, utility
companies are removing
vegetation around power
lines and are ready to
impose blackouts when
those lines threaten to spark
a fi re.
Armies of fi refi ghters
are being beefed up. And
communities are off ering
incentives for residents to
make their own properties
fi re-resistant.
Still, much work remains
to change the region’s tra-
jectory with fi re, particu-
larly in two key areas, said
Scott Stephens, professor
of wildland fi re science at
the University of California,
Berkeley.
“One is getting people
better prepared for the inev-
itability of fi re in areas like
the wildland-urban inter-
face. That includes new con-
struction,” he said. “And the
second is getting our eco-
systems better prepared
for climate change and fi re
impacts.”
On the local level, indi-
viduals and communities
need to create defensible
spaces and evacuation plans,
he said. On the govern-
ment level, more resources
need to go toward managing
forests.
“I think we’ve got one
to two decades,” Stephens
said. “If we don’t do this
in earnest, we’re frankly
just going to be watching
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Kyle Kosma/High Desert Museum
U.S. Forest Service fi refi ghters carry out a prescribed burn on the
grounds of the High Desert Museum, near Bend, on May 14, 2021.
the forest change right in
front of our eyes from fi re,
climate change, drought,
insects, things of that
nature.”
Part of the issue is that
increasing wildfi re resilience
often requires trade-off s,
said Erica Fleishman, pro-
fessor at Oregon State Uni-
versity’s College of Earth,
Ocean, and Atmospheric
Sciences.
Cities or states could
require defensible spaces
around homes. Building
codes could call for fi re-re-
sistant materials. That would
drive up construction costs
but also mean homes would
be less likely to burn and
need rebuilding, she said.
“The insurance industry
and the building industry
and communities and law-
makers are all going to need
to have the will to create
these changes,” she said.
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