3A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2017
The West had a snowy winter, so why the fiery summer?
Fires rage
across region
By DAN ELLIOTT
Associated Press
DENVER — Acrid yellow
smoke clogs the skies of major
Western U.S. cities, a human-
caused fire in the Columbia
River Gorge rains ash on Port-
land, and a century-old back-
country chalet burns to the
ground in Montana’s Glacier
National Park.
Wildfires are chewing
across dried-out Western for-
ests and grassland, putting 2017
on track to be among the worst
fire seasons in a decade.
A snowy winter across
much of the West raised hopes
that 2017 wouldn’t be a dried-
out, fire-prone year, but a hot,
dry summer spoiled that.
Here’s what happened, and
how bad things are:
How did we get here?
Heavy snows last win-
ter brought relief from a long,
brutal drought across much of
the West and produced a lush
growth of natural grasses —
thicker and taller than many
vegetation experts had ever
seen. But the weather turned
very hot very fast in the spring,
and the snow melted much
faster than expected.
All the grass that grew
high dried out, and so did for-
ests at higher elevations, leav-
ing plenty of fuel for wildfires,
said Bryan Henry, a manager
at the National Interagency
Fire Center, which coordinates
wildfire-fighting.
Summer lightning storms
then dumped less rain than
usual and weather conditions
kept the humidity low, creat-
ing a natural tinderbox in many
states.
“It was kind of a bad com-
bination of things,” Henry said.
How big are the fires?
By Thursday, more than 76
large fires were burning in nine
Western states, according to the
interagency fire center.
So far this year, wildfires
have burned more than 12,500
square miles nationwide. In
the past decade, only two years
were worse at this point in the
wildfire season: 2015 and 2012.
For all of 2015, a record
15,800 square miles burned. In
2012, 14,600 square miles were
scorched.
What about climate
change?
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Wildfires a wake-up call
for many urban residents
Tree-eating beetles
Two dozen species of bee-
tles have killed trees on nearly
85,000 square miles in the
Western U.S. since 2000.
They’re responsible for about
20 percent of the 6.3 billion
standing dead trees across the
West, according to the U.S.
Forest Service.
Researchers disagree on
whether forests with bee-
tle-killed trees are more likely
to burn, or if they burn differ-
ently, than healthier forests.
Any standing dead tree
— whether killed by beetles,
drought, lightning or other
causes — can crash down,
posing hazards for firefighters
who must adjust their tactics to
avoid them.
Who’s fighting the fires?
More than 26,000 people
are fighting the fires, backed
by more than 200 helicopters,
1,800 trucks and 28 air tankers
dropping water and fire-retar-
dant slurry. Three of those tank-
ers are military C-130 planes.
The military has also
assigned surveillance aircraft
and at least 200 active-duty
soldiers to fight fires and the
National Guard has been called
out in at least four states — Cal-
ifornia Montana, Oregon and
Washington.
“We’re stretched thin,” said
Jennifer Jones, a spokeswoman
for the interagency fire center.
Sometimes the center gets
requests for more crews and
equipment than it has, so “fire
managers on the ground are
adjusting their tactics and strat-
egies to accommodate the
resources they can get,” Jones
said.
“We don’t pack up our tents
and go home.”
How bad are the losses?
Nine firefighters have died
and 35 have been injured this
year, according to the national
Wildland Fire Lessons Learned
Center. Two of the deaths came
during training.
Fires have destroyed an esti-
mated 500 single-family homes
and 32 commercial buildings
this year, the interagency fire
center said.
Janet Ruiz of the Insurance
Information Institute sees a
hopeful trend in fewer houses
lost to wildfires in recent years.
Ruiz credits better-equipped
firefighters and homeowners
who take steps to minimize
the danger such as clearing
trees away from buildings and
installing screens over dwelling
Rural residents
used to fires
By ERIC
MORTENSON
EO Media Group
Genna Martin/Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Smoke clouds from the Eagle Creek Fire obscure the sun
above Multnomah Falls on Wednesday near Troutdale.
openings to keep embers out.
“It’s a better-informed pub-
lic and fire services better able
to fight fire,” she said.
sphere at once than a fire, he
said.
What about all the
smoke?
Federal spending to fight
fires appears to be headed for a
record.
The two main firefighting
agencies, the U.S. Forest Ser-
vice and the U.S. Department
of Interior, report spending of
more than $2.1 billion so far.
That’s about the same as they
spent in all of 2015, the most
expensive wildfire season on
record.
Those figures do not include
individual state spending,
which no single agency com-
piles. Montana has spent $50
million, exhausting its firefight-
ing reserve fund in just over a
month. Oregon has spent $28
million, but the state expects to
be reimbursed for part of that
by the federal government and
others.
“It’s unusually bad,” said
Henry, of the National Inter-
agency Fire Center.
Smoke is lingering from
northern California and cen-
tral Nevada to Montana. The
air over parts of northern Cali-
fornia, Idaho, Montana, Oregon
and Washington is rated very
unhealthy on the U.S. Envi-
ronmental Protection Agen-
cy’s AirNow website. It was
not clear whether sources other
than fires were contributing.
The air over the towns
of Cottonwood and Porthill,
Idaho, were listed as hazard-
ous, the worst of six categories.
Fires spew particulates into
the air, which are linked to pre-
mature death and cancer and
can make asthma and chronic
lung disease worse, said Dr.
Norman H. Edelman, a senior
science adviser to the American
Lung Association.
“It certainly is bad enough
to cause symptoms in people
with chronic lung disease but
also normal people,” he said.
A volcanic eruption is prob-
ably the only thing that pumps
more particulates into the atmo-
How much has
firefighting cost?
When is it going to get
better?
The outlook is bleak for
Montana, most of the North-
west and much of California
through September, accord-
ing to the interagency fire cen-
ter. The fire risk is expected to
remain very high in Montana
and the Southern California
coast through October.
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Portland’s downtown
disappeared from view this
week as thick smoke from
wildfires settled in for an
uncomfortable stay.
And that made it a prob-
lem, even though forest
fires have been burning
elsewhere in the West for
several weeks.
All told, there were 65
active fires in nine West-
ern states as of mid-day
Wednesday, including 19
in Oregon. The active fires
have burned 1.4 million
acres.
As multiple rural res-
idents said in effect on
social media: Welcome to
our world, Portland.
Some
Oregonians
who work in or support
the state’s stagnant tim-
ber industry had another
response: We told you so.
What got Portland’s
attention was the Eagle
Creek Fire in the Colum-
bia River Gorge east of
the city, a spectacular
80-mile stretch of river,
timber, basalt formations
and waterfalls that attracts
legions of climbers, hikers
and scads of tourists. The
chair of the Multnomah
County Board of Commis-
sioners mourned the dam-
age to what she called “our
playground.”
The Eagle Creek Fire lit
up the Gorge like a vision
from hell and merged with
the Indian Creek Fire to
cover more than 30,000
acres.
If Portlanders were
stunned by the wild-
fire’s leaping fury, many
rural Oregonians and peo-
ple who work in natural
resource industries said the
state, and much of the West,
is paying the price of para-
lyzed forest management
policy.
Critics say the state’s
publicly-managed forests
are primed for disastrous
fires. They believe timber-
land agencies, especially
the Bureau of Land Man-
agement and U.S. Forest
Service, are shackled by
decades of lawsuits and
continued argument over
endangered species, wild-
life habitat, logging roads
and water quality.
A stark statistic illus-
trates the state of affairs:
Federal agencies manage
60 percent of Oregon’s for-
estland, nearly 18 million
acres, but that land accounts
for just 15 percent of the
annual timber harvest,
according to the Oregon
Forest Resources Institute.
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Tickets available at the door. See you there!
Expires 9/15/17
It’s making things worse for
fires, said Jonathan Overpeck,
dean of the School for Environ-
ment and Sustainability at the
University of Michigan.
Hotter and drier weather is a
symptom of human-caused cli-
mate change, and that’s mak-
ing fires worse by leaving for-
ests and other vegetation more
flammable.
“It’s not of course playing
the only role,” he said. “There’s
natural variability at work.”
“Humans are contributing
to an ever-increasing degree
to wildfires in the West as they
emit greenhouse gases and
warm the planet and warm the
West,” Overpeck said.
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