‘Angel’s Rest is toast,” was the grim report from a pilot flying above the wildfire-scorched Columbia River Gorge on Sept. 24. The Eagle Creek fire brought its sad impacts — incinerated wildlife and destroyed businesses — closer to Southwest Washington residents than at any time in recent memory. The experience leaves residents here searching for answers.
Our 2017 fire season was not the first recent catastrophe; 2014 and 2015 yielded some of the largest wildfires in the history of Washington state, burning about 1.4 million acres. Hot, dry conditions sparked by lightning and human stupidity start fires but do not account for the recent longer fire seasons and larger burned acreage.
Climate change, a nebulous factor, does not explain why the majority of the fires, now burning hotter and over wider acreage, is concentrated on federal land, as compared to private or state lands. The Oregon State Forester reports that of 672,500 acres burned in Oregon, 94 percent are on federal lands, though state and federal lands are roughly the same acreage. On private lands such as Weyerhaeuser’s, fires are more efficiently managed on stands of trees of varying ages and heights.
Due to annual budget cuts and environmental lawsuits over the past three decades, federal forests have been managed as preserves rather than as active multiuse forests producing the region’s renewable timber supply. The result of diminished harvests has been to produce a thick, uniform forest canopy ideally suited for large, hot fires that destroy the soil, seeds and spores needed to regenerate. Tragically, observations at Washington’s Carlton Complex Fire area conclude that the forest is not regenerating, and may never recover.
