Wildfire
Wildfires currently burning in Alberta, Canada signal the beginning of wildfire season to many people. But, to experts, it’s no longer easy to say when that season begins or ends, as climate change increases the size and duration of wildfires throughout the American West.
The Island’s lush, well-watered landscape might fool us into thinking we’re immune from wildfire threat. The historical record tells a different story. Wildfires of considerable intensity have burned many places on the Island. In earlier times, indigenous peoples used fire to steward for game animals and edible plants in Paradise Valley. Euro-Americans burnt forests in many parts of the Island to clear for agriculture. More recently, carelessness has been the source of unwanted wildfire: An untended beach fire raced up the side of a bank on Maury Island a few decades ago and torched a madrone forest; a brush fire that got out of control on the North End a while back burnt several acres. The list goes on.
The alarming truth is that, as neglected fields grow over with woody invasives and unmanaged Island forests stack up forest debris, we’re inadvertently fueling the next conflagrations. Our houses sit in the path of fire, with fuels like landscaping mulch sitting right up next to their foundations. We’re just not being as firewise as we ought to be.
Wildfire planners for our kind of area—technically known as the urban-wildland interface—talk frankly about protecting human life and property from fire and, beyond that, having little choice but to witness fire burn as far and as hot as it wants. Resources to suppress frequent and intense fires—the new normal for the West—will be stretched beyond the breaking point. There’s also the stark fact that wildfire on the landscape is part of a natural regime, cleaning up debris and releasing plants that evolved to rely on fire for their survival and success.
The good news for the Island is that local fire professionals are trained in wildfire response and are offering presentations on wildfire prevention for Islanders. Washington State’s Department of Natural Resources is bringing its Wildfire Ready Neighbors program to King County, offering to work at the community level to protect property from wildfire. And King Conservation District is ramping up its Wildfire Mitigation Cost-Share Program to help property owners in the “home-hardening” process—i.e., working to establish zones of “defensible space” around buildings to protect them from, among other wildfire effects, fire that jumps from tree crowns to structures or embers that float through over-heated air to roofs (the most common source of home loss due to wildfire).
