The trick to fighting wildfires in the steep canyons of the north Cascades is to look for every available resource, even rock faces, to hold back and contain the flames, said veteran firefighter Alan Lawson.
Hundreds of firefighters are using those tactics now against the more than 4,500-acre Sourdough fire in North Cascades National Park. Lawson commands Incident Management Team 10, which has been fighting the fire for weeks now and has about 11% of the blaze contained.
“We’re using natural barriers, previous fire scars, roads, anything we can find,” Lawson said, as his crew relies on these areas that won’t burn as a way to block the flames.
Portions of the Sourdough fire might burn for months more, Lawson said. But he’s optimistic his team can continue to protect the homes and people in the area, as well as the dams that generate electricity for Seattle.
Firefighters must become accustomed to working more in Washington’s forests and rocky outcrops, Lawson said. Once rare, these types of fires are increasingly common.
Wildfire seasons in Washington are starting earlier and ending later, even lasting into October, wildfire ecologists say. The flames burn more intensely and scorch wider swathes of ground.
While the Sourdough fire isn’t the largest Washington has seen this year (the more than 61,000-acre Newell Road fire is), it’s representative of the state’s forests that are increasingly in peril as rising temperatures combine with persistent drought.
More people, communities and critical infrastructure are at risk of major wildfires now than ever before and the problem is largely one of our own making, said Ernesto Alvarado, a professor of wildland fire sciences at the University of Washington.
Trees, shrubs and grasslands have grown, often uninterrupted, for generations and eventually they’ll serve as fuel for the inevitable.
“These forests are going to burn, there’s no way around it,” Alvarado said. “They’ll either burn today or they’ll burn later.”
The new fire season
Generally, Washington’s wildfire season begins around June when summer heat cooks off moisture left over from winter and spring, said Matthew Dehr, a wildland fire meteorologist for the state’s Department of Natural Resources.
The season peaks mid-July to mid-September, Dehr said, closing around the end of that month with the shortening days and fall rains. But that’s the old schedule.
Consider this year, Dehr said, noting the rainy April morphed into a hot, dry May (the second warmest in Seattle’s history).
“The precipitation really shut off,” Dehr said. “That started our fire season early and got our fuels ready to burn quickly.”
By mid-June fires had broken out in Olympic National Park and the Columbia Basin. State officials declared a drought emergency across a dozen of the state’s watersheds in July and global temperatures reached their hottest average temperatures ever recorded for both months.
That story is playing out with each passing year, Dehr said. Summers are growing hotter and drier and the conditions compound, worsening the following wildfire seasons.
These days, Washington’s wildfire season begins around May, Dehr said, and increasingly it doesn’t end until October, which is expected to be the case this year, according to the National Interagency Fire Center’s latest three-month outlook. The state’s entire western coastline will remain at an increased fire risk through that month, the data shows.
El Niño conditions are also expected to arrive later in the year, pushing warm, tropical air into the Pacific Northwest, likely meaning more rain than snow this winter, enough to make Dehr nervous for next year.
Preventing fires with fire
Increasingly state officials are leaning on prescribed burns to reduce wildfire risk, resuming the practice last year after a nearly two-decade hiatus.
“We know fires work,” Alvarado said. “You keep burning frequently and eventually you decrease the fire risk.”
But there’s much to catch up on, he said. Generations of fire suppression have allowed an inordinate amount of fuels to accumulate. And the season for prescribed burns is limited by the high-risk summer months.
In the meantime, wildfires are growing larger and burning more intensely because they have so much more fuel to consume, Alvarado said.
Lawson said he’s seeing the reality up close. When he started fighting fires in 1977, he said a wildfire torching 500 to 1,000 acres was considered so big they’d call it a “project fire.”
Now, they’re seeing fires tear through tens or hundreds of thousands of acres, Lawson said.
The total number of acres burned in a given season is trending upward too, Dehr said. Over the past 30 years, Washington has seen six years when wildfire damage totaled more than 400,000 acres and all of them fell within the last eight years. That includes 2015, when wildfires scorched across the state.
The increased fire activity is dangerous and inconvenient, said Susan Prichard, a scientist specializing in wildfire ecology at the University of Washington. But in the big picture many of them — like prescribed burns — are healthy for the ecosystems, cutting down the excess fuels that have built up over generations of inactivity.
“It’s a bitter pill,” Prichard said.
The threat to dams
Not only are more people and communities at risk of these wildfires but so too are the critical pieces of infrastructure that bring electricity to Washington’s population centers.
The Sourdough fire burns near three of Seattle City Light’s hydropower plants and two of the utility’s company towns, Newhalem and Diablo, said Mike Haynes, the utility’s interim general manager and CEO. In all, about 85 people live in the area and run the utility’s Skagit River Project, which consists of the Diablo, Gorge and Ross dams.
Earlier this month 15 people (and two animals) evacuated their homes in Diablo and utility officials stopped generating power at two of the three dams, Haynes said. That marks the second time a wildfire forced the utility to stop generating power. The first came in 2015 after fires in the same region damaged transmission lines leading to the same dams.
Haynes said it’s still too early to tell whether the temporarily downed hydro plants will lead to increased rates this year but said he’s concerned these conditions will repeat in the future. The utility must plan around these wildfires and take proactive steps to clear the fuels around their dams and transmission lines, he said.
Lawson said crews are working to protect the towns of Newhalem and Diablo and to keep the people in the area safe. But portions of the fire are stretching into alpine areas that people can’t reach. In those areas, the flames might burn until winter while the crews can only watch, he said.
This is the new reality for firefighters in the Pacific Northwest, Lawson said.
“The dynamics have changed, we’ve all noticed it,” Lawson said. “It is what it is.”
At times, Lawson said he feels the region is behind the curve, working to catch up. He worries about the danger, the stretched resources. And, of course, he said he worries about the men and women on the fire lines, stretched thinner with each passing season.
