Living with Wildfire
Four years after the Almeda Fire tore through Talent, Oregon and its sister town, Phoenix, the sense of both terror and loss are still palpable.
Here in Ashland, five miles to the south, “being firewise” has become a mantra.
At a recent “fire preparedness” meeting at Grange Hall down the road from where I live, Kelly Burns, Ashland’s Emergency Management Coordinator, recounted the bright September day when a swath of drought-stricken brush and wind gusts up to 40 mph united to ignite an unimaginable firestorm a heartbeat away.
“Thirty-years of firefighting hadn’t prepared me for what unfolded that day,” Burns said.
Overwhelmed and outmatched, Burns and his team contended with burst water lines, fire hydrants that didn’t work, and a fire so hot that firefighters could not reach manual gas turn-off switches. Indeed, the fire soon spread through underground gas lines between houses sending structures up in flames from below when the danger from the fire spreading above ground seemed negligible.
“Flames moved as fast as a bobcat could run,” he said.
When the winds finally quieted the following afternoon, the Almeda Fire had consumed 2,500 structures and displaced nearly 6,000 residents, but miraculously killed only three.
When summer gave way to fall, the 2020 Oregon wildfire season went down as the most destructive on record. The fires killed at least 11 people, burned more than 1.4 million acres of land, and destroyed thousands of homes.
A headline in the New York Times declared it “Apocalyptic.”
Wildfire in our future
The latest data on forest fires confirms what we fear: Forest fires are becoming more widespread, burning at least twice as much tree cover today as they did two decades ago. Record-setting forest fires are becoming the norm, with 2020, 2021 and 2023 marking the three worst years for forest fires in the U.S. (globally as well).
If you’ve followed the explosion of wildfire news coverage in recent years — from the dense Canadian wildfire smoke blanketing New York City last summer to the 2018 Paradise Fire in Northern California, which caused 85 fatalities, displaced more than 50,000 people, destroyed more than 18,000 structures, causing an estimated $16.5 billion in damage — you’ve no doubt learned how warming temperatues and persistent droughts have turned up the flames, most of all across the Western U.S.
You’ve also probably learned (I hope) that the 20th century practice of fire suppression is another, if not key, contributor. The Native Americans, who had once regularly set fires to clear crops and regenerate soil, until the federal government forbade the practice, had it right: fire is medicine. Creating breaks in the sprawling forests and grasslands that wildfires couldn’t cross, since the fuel — the vegetation — had already burned, were health giving.
“We have to question the narrative of history that has demonized fire,” forest scientist Frank Lake, a descendant of the Karuk Tribe, says.
At the end of a hot summer’s day, what forest ecologists call “plant biomass,” warm and dry conditions, and an ignition source (from humans, lightning, or power lines) offer a perfect trigger for wildfire growth. Whether a given location will be more fire-prone in the future depends a great deal on what controls wildfire occurrence there now.
Get ready. Get set. Go Now!
Kelly Burn’s first mission at the Grange Hall meeting two weeks ago was to walk us through the current building blocks of Ashland’s fire readiness plan: evacuation zones and maps, go bags, the 1-2-3 “Get ready. Get set. Go now!” alert system, the city’s Evergreen System for cell phone real-time advisories.
(The meeting was the brainchild of a local group called Ashland Together, started in 2022 to forge conversations across race in Ashland’s preponderantly white community. It was an experiment: rather than tackle issues of race and social equity head on, Ashland Together created a sidedoor for bringing together diverse voices where communication and collaboration weren’t just desirable but critical — in this case around catastrophic wildfire, a threat we all shared. The participants, 70 in all, included the young and old, privileged and not, homeowners and renters, single moms and caregivers, the fire-wise savvy along with newbies. The local community newspaper, Ashland News, was a co-sponsor.)
If Ashland’s Emergency Management Coordinator had a mantra, it was anticipate and practice. “If you have your normal travel of how you get in and out of town, start learning new ways,” Burns advised. “Have multiple evacuation routes and practice them, like the evacuation drills you used to do in school.” “If you have special needs — including medications critical to your health — take pre-emptive action.” “If you are fortunate enough to have family and friends nearby that you rely on and vice versa, strengthen those connections.”
Soon, the meeting moved beyond preparing for the knowable to problem solving about unknowns with “neighbors” we’d never met. The room had been set up so that participants gathered around small tables.
Acknowledging Murphy’s Law (“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”), Ashland Together’s Tara Houston, the occasion’s emcee, tossed out several scenarios.
You have your go bag, your tank is filled up and you have your loved ones (including pets) in tow. You get the ‘Go Now!’ alert. If the fire is coming from the south, where will you head? If it’s coming from the north, what are the options? You have settled on your evacuation route, but what happens if roads are backed up? What if Internet and cell access goes down?‘
My discussion partners in this exercise included Connor, an SOU student and member of the Ashland News board of directors; Jess, vice president of BASE (Black Alliance and Social Empowerment) and mother of two toddlers; Louise, who is a services team member at the Ashland YMCA and much more; and Deb, a volunteer with CERT.
Before addressing evacuation routes and destinations, we took up the “black box of befores,” as one member of our group put it. Who amongst us had prepared a go bag? Yes for Connor and Deb. Somewhat for Jess. No for Louise and me. Who had water jugs stored in their car and a perennial half-tank of gas? Score one for Connor. “Go home tonight and put a gallon of water in your trunk — and cross that off your list,” he added. “The best way to prepare is one small step at a time.”
“How do I prepare my two and four-year old for the possibility of evacuation without scaring them?” Jess asked.
“I’m a renter in a building with other apartments,” said Louise. “How do I begin a conversation on how we can support each other?”
“How do I round up our cat who leads a free roaming life?” I asked. Connor shared how he has trained his cat to love its cat carrier by placing special treats inside. (His aunt had died in a wildfire when she returned home to search for her cat.)
“I get the preparation part, but when I get in my car to GO, I have no idea where I’m heading” Jess said. “I figure we’ll end up in some random city, whether it’s north or south of Ashland.”
Connor shared his fantasy of heading to San Francisco where the relative he’s closest too lives. “I have a hundred dollar bill in my go bag that would get me a hotel for the first night.”
“Talking about this makes me realize how much I haven’t thought about where I’ll go,” said Louise.
As for jammed roads and downed communications, our group agreed that we needed to think about this as if we are building a tool kit. What are the options for getting out of town? If we can’t make progress by car, what about on foot? Where are the big open spaces we can reach (a.k.a. “temporary evacuation points,” often large parking lots, also cemeteries)?
Only one of us owned a battery-operated radio. We talked about creating a pre-arranged plan for meeting or connecting with the people we are close to should cell coverage go down. (Later that evening, back home, I googled “What to do in a wildfire when your phone stops working,” and found a wonderful NPR article about the intricacies of cell communication when it’s failing — and the possibilities.)
The meeting ended on a sober note. After we’d “shared out” from our small groups, Charisse Sydoriak from the Ashland Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) took the stage. “What’s so important about this conversation,” she said, “is preparing for the uncertainties.”
All the attention to go bags and getting your car ready, that’s great stuff, but also think about how you can get to a safe place as fast as you can, whether by foot or car. Thinking that what happened in the Almeda Fire, where the fire moved two miles an hour, can’t happen here isn’t a plan. You must care for yourself and others. It’s real and it’s traumatic.‘
The man sitting behind me said, “Amen.” When the meeting wrapped up, Connor, Jess, Louise, and I held hands.
Living with wildfire
As I write this story, I struggle for an afterward, a perspective that centers the idea of coexisting with fires.
In a recent article in the magazine American Scientist, a “biogeographer” and disaster historian note that wildfire creates the illusion of being controllable, unlike other natural hazards such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes — even though a common thread running through the descriptions of today’s wildfires is how uncontrollable, how unfightable they have become.
Rather than fighting most natural disasters, the two scientists write, the typical response is to prepare for them, to accommodate their inevitable occurrence, and to reduce the risk of losses where possible. In dangerous locations, building codes and land-use planning are established to make living there more survivable or to discourage building there in the first place.
“With wildfire, the primary response is to fight fires rather than to accept them as a recurring fact of life in fire-prone ecosystems,” Max Moritz and Scott Gabriel Knowles note. “In between such events, the aim is often to fight the vegetation that may fuel the next fire.”
As I watched a complicated effort over six weeks this spring to remove by helicopter, one-by-one, dead and dying trees from the Ashland Watershed (with the helicopters breaking down along the way), I couldn’t help but think God help us.
When I read a 2021 comprehensive report from the U.S. Department of Transportation on the chaotic nature of most evacuations, I prayed again. The report warned, among other things, that the enforcement of evacuation orders when disaster strikes is problematic; evacuation orders with minimal notice are difficult to manage; it is hard to get people to evacuate; evacuations can occur in all conditions, including the night.
Rather than fighting a losing battle, wouldn’t promoting the right kind of fire — and smarter development— be safer and more cost-effective, I ask.
An hour ago, Tony and I returned from our almost daily hike up the forested mountain slope that abuts our house. Three years ago, Ashland’s fire resiliency team completed a dozen small, controlled burns of dead vegetation on the slope. Today, after a summer of over 100 degree days and no rain for months, the madrones, firs, and underbrush a quarter mile from our home are set to explode.
We have yet to pack a go bag.
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