CAMAS — The presence of fire crews, emergency vehicles and smoke drifting up from the Lacamas Prairie Natural Area early Tuesday afternoon may have alarmed some residents, but it was all part of a controlled burn by the state Department of Natural Resources.
“Prescribed fire is one of the most important tools used to manage wildfires,” Public Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz said by phone Tuesday.
The agency expected the fire, even though it was planned, would raise concerns so it sent flyers to nearby homes, posted notices on social media and put up signs along neighboring streets.
“Fire is natural in our landscape. What isn’t natural is how unhealthy our landscapes, our forests are. They are struggling from drought, insect infestation, disease. We have too much fuel out there, which is why what might have been a healthy smaller fire became a catastrophic fire,” Franz said.
Tuesday’s burn, which was limited to about 10 acres, was the sixth at Lacamas Prairie in the past five years. DNR spokesman Ryan Rodruck said there is lot of planning, coordination and discussion before the first flame is lit.
“We have two sets of crews on a controlled burn. There’s a firing crew and a hold crew. The firing crew walks around with drip torches and starts lining off lines of flames. … We just do a spot at a time. It’s all under very controlled circumstances,” he said.
The hold line keeps the fire from moving beyond the set boundary. For Tuesday’s prescribed fire, there were about 30 crew members, some from DNR and some from Columbia Gorge TREX, a peer-to-peer training program with the Washington Prescribed Fire Council.
Before the full burn can start, crews set a small test fire to ensure the area is burning as expected. They review air temperature, humidity, wind speed and even soil composition before and during the test fire, as well as during the full burn, to ensure the fire isn’t moving too quickly or too slowly and is moving in the right direction.
“If it’s successful, we’ll keep right on going. If it’s not producing the conditions that we want … we’ll stop and wait for whatever conditions we need to continue,” Rodruck said.
He said the controlled burn would benefit the natural area beyond reducing the potential for wildfire.
“It allows for those native species that require fire to thrive and it also removes non-native species,” he said. “We want to remove the bad fuels and encourage the good growth of native plants.”
Unique habitat
The Lacamas Prairie Natural Area offers a unique habitat found in only a few places in Washington.
“It’s part of this whole context of priority landscapes. It’s part of protecting and revitalizing what is the best-known remnant of Willamette Valley wet prairie ecosystems in Washington,” Franz said. “This is a habitat that once covered more than 7 million acres.”
She said about 80 percent of the remaining wetland habitat is within the 1,600-acre natural area.
“There are seven rare plants here, including the Bradshaw’s lomatium, which was federally endangered but was recently delisted,” said Carlo Abbruzzese, natural areas manager for DNR. “Without fire, the woody plants would march in here and turn it into (woodlands). We’re trying to knock back the woody plants.”
Abbruzzese said the controlled burn also gets rid of invasive and aggressive grasses such as reed canary grass and meadow foxtail.
“When it’s done burning, it will be completely black. It allows us to come in and get good soil contact and we can put native seed out,” he said.
For much of Washington’s history, wildfires mostly occurred east of the Cascade Range where conditions are warmer and drier. Franz said that has changed in recent years and more fires are happening west of the Cascades due to climate change or other reasons.
“We sort of woke up to a new normal that we’re going to see more significant, catastrophic fires in Washington state starting in 2014 to 2016,” she said.
Franz said prescribed burns not only limit the spread and devastation of natural and human-caused wildfires but can be good for the landscape.
Starting in the mid-2000s, the state suspended the use of prescribed burns to manage forest and grasslands.
In 2018, DNR returned to using controlled burns. But Franz said more needs to be done to make prescribed fire an effective tool in the state’s toolbox, especially as DNR works to restore 1.25 million acres of forests on federal, state, tribal and private lands in the next 20 years.
“We are just at the beginning of building out a robust prescribed fire infrastructure,” she said. “As we developed and launched the plan and we were trying to put all the tools in place for more resilient lands resistant to fire, we walked into so many walls. We had statutes we had to change. We had to change a number of laws that prevented us from doing prescribed fires. We had rulemaking to change, which also takes time and energy.”
Because Clark County and other areas west of the Cascades have much larger populations with far more development than in rural areas in Eastern Washington, Franz said wildfires here have a greater risk of impacting residents.
She said the Lacamas natural area, which is almost entirely surrounded by homes, is a great example of this.
For Abbruzzese, there are additional reasons to protect and preserve the Lacamas Prairie Natural Area.
“We’ve got a rare bird in the oak woodland, a subspecies of the white breasted nuthatch called the slender billed nuthatch, and we might have a rare squirrel — the western gray squirrel. We don’t know for sure,” he said. “There’s a bunch a rare plants, including one that we found about six years ago called tall penstemon, which was thought to be extinct. … This site has the biggest population anywhere in the world.”
