By Bill Lucia | Editor
The end of Pacific Northwest fire season is in sight, but the scale and severity of this year’s blazes will surely propel further discussion about how to reduce wildfire risk. One important option fire managers can turn to is prescribed burns.
“We need to be burning ourselves out of the problem, not waiting for fire to show up when we don’t want it,” said Kyle Lapham, who has managed Washington’s Certified Prescribed Burn Manager program since it launched in 2022. The state’s Department of Natural Resources puts on the course to encourage more residents to light carefully planned fires in overly dense forests to help ward off massive wildfires.
Today, we bring you an inside look at the course and in-depth reporting on how Roslyn has increased prescribed burning in recent years after a close call with wildfire.
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A crew member uses a drip torch to ignite a prescribed burn in southwest Washington. Leaders in Washington and other states want to empower more residents to lead burns like this on private lands. (Photo by Alex Brown/Stateline)
By Alex Brown
For most of us, fire feels like an ominous foe, one we have to trust others to fight. But crews on the front lines have a different relationship with fire. They understand that it’s a natural part of healthy ecosystems, one that has been absent from many Western forests for far too long.
Particularly in the West, a century of wildfire suppression has left many forests overly dense. Places that used to burn regularly now have more trees per acre than ever before, and a forest floor stacked with dead limbs, needles and brush — kindling for the catastrophic megafires that can devastate millions of acres.
Increasingly, federal and state managers are trying to restore fire’s role. Burning in the spring and fall, they’ve spread low-intensity fires in state forests and national parks to reduce fuels and “treat” unhealthy forests. That work can lower the risk of high-intensity wildfires by 60%, research has shown.
But lots of the forests that need fire are not managed by the U.S. Forest Service or a state agency. And burning on private lands is incredibly difficult. Many states now want to empower landowners and community groups to burn on their own. They’re training burn leaders and offering grants, equipment and technical support.
Areas that have burned in previous years now feature open meadows, the mature trees charred but still healthy. (Photo by Alex Brown/Stateline)
By Alex Brown
Roslyn’s wake-up call came in 2017. The Jolly Mountain Fire, sparked by lightning strikes in the nearby Wenatchee National Forest, advanced toward the town on Labor Day weekend. The fire’s incident commander gave local leaders a grim assessment.
“(He said), ‘I hate to tell you, but if fire gets into these woods, we’re going to have to write off large portions of your town as indefensible,’” recalls Chris Martin, emergency management coordinator with the Roslyn Fire Department. “That was the change-of-underwear moment for Roslyn.”
Thankfully, the fire changed course, but Roslyn now knew it was sitting on a tinderbox. The idyllic mountain community of 950 with a rich coal mining history is now a thriving tourist town that plays host to campers, mountain bikers, artists and foodies. It also ranks in the 99th percentile for wildfire risk nationwide.
Martin keeps a map showing an ever-growing patchwork of black and yellow blobs surrounding the town. The black spots mark the 500-plus acres that local leaders have burned since 2017. The yellow represents areas where they’ve brought in logging equipment to thin trees and brush. Together, they form a rough semicircle around Roslyn that’s meant to act as a shield. If a wildfire hits this area, it will quickly be deprived of fuel — giving firefighters a chance to make a stand.
COMMENTARY
By Paul Osterman
A growing trend in the U.S. economy: employees who work at an employer’s site, but their employer makes no commitment to them for career prospects or job security.
Labor economist Paul Osterman dubs these “disposable jobs,” a concept he explores in a new book and in this op-ed. “My research shows that employers treat more than 1 in 3 U.S. workers as disposable,” he writes. “That comes to just under 57 million full- or part-time workers out of the nation’s workforce of 162 million.”
“A primary motive is to save money,” he writes. “Employing freelancers and contractors means they can avoid mandatory benefits such as Social Security contributions and, for larger employers, contributing to the cost of health insurance.”
ICYMI
Wildfire risks are driving up costs for Northwest utilities | by Aspen Ford
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