A hastily scrawled sign on a fence outside a Twisp home implores: “Firefighters, this is just a house — please stay safe.”
It’s a message made more heartbreaking by Wednesday evening’s news that three firefighters had died and four others were injured, one critically, while responding to fires near the Methow Valley town, one of scores of fires burning in Washington state and throughout the West.
It’s a fire season for this state that is likely to challenge what was a record blaze in last year’s Carlton Complex fire, which burned more than 256,000 acres, destroyed more than 300 homes and cost more than $128 million to fight. Emergency planners are having to make decisions about how best to deploy resources that already are stretched thin. At the request of the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, Joint Base Lewis-McChord is training 200 soldiers to join firefighters on the fire lines.
None of this was a surprise; officials and lawmakers knew this was likely to be a bad fire season as droughts lengthened in California and took hold in typically green Washington state. The threat was present in mind enough to convince the Washington Legislature to commit $10 million in its budget, money requested by the state Department of Natural Resources to thin forests and remove brush on public lands and help homeowners prepare defensible spaces around their homes, a program called Firewise, during the next two years. The DNR had sought $20 million for the work, a request — now illuminated by the fires — that looks more than justifiable and should be addressed when the Legislature next convenes.
In June, U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell prepared a white paper on wildfires that not only urges a change in how funds are allocated for fighting fires but a reassessment of how we fight fires and prepare for them. The white paper’s points, now part of proposed legislation in the “Wildfire Disaster Funding Act of 2015,” recognize that the nature of wildfires has changed over the last several decades.
“We cannot keep using the same, tired approaches that we have used for the last 100 years,” Cantwell, D-Washington, said in a release.
The senator in the white paper and in the legislation recommends:
- Funding firefighting for the largest fires out of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Disaster Relief Fund rather than cash-strapped state and federal agencies.
- Focusing firefighting efforts on where the need is greatest with the recognition that some “good” fires, which can reduce a buildup of fuels, are better contained than extinguished.
- Preparing ahead of fire seasons to make communities and homes less susceptible to fires through programs such as Firewise but also by changing building codes to discourage materials like cedar shake roofs for homes in forested areas.
- Changing how emergency services are delivered during wildfires to more closely resemble responses to floods, hurricanes and other disasters.
If the trend for wildfires to become more frequent and more destructive continues, we will have to make better decisions on how best to use the resources available to protect lives first and then how to protect property and public lands.
After all, firefighters, these are just houses. Please stay safe.
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