What's Tony Thinking

Fire Wise and Fire Worried

It is a hazy day here today. Which means that smoke from wildfires somewhere, probably central and western Oregon, has found its way to us in the Wallowas. The haze makes what is normally a cerulean blue sky, deep green forests, ochre moraines and reddish basaltic rimrock pretty much all grey. I’ve seen it worse, much worse.

But up until maybe 25 years ago, we didn’t see this at all unless there was an actual fire in our area. Now, the map of fires burning across the west, each marked with a red circle, looks like someone with measles or a horrible case of acne.

What’s changed? At last Saturday’s meeting of the Wallowa Lake Property Owner’s Association, our new County Fire Wise Coordinator, who has spent 20 years on the front lines fighting fire, began with the following analogy:

“How often do you vacuum your home?” she asked. “Once a day? Once a week? Twice a week?” “Now, imagine that you aren’t allowed to vacuum for 80 years.”

I immediately pictured myself suffocating in fluffy mounds and heaps of dog and cat hair. We’ve had two dogs, golden retrievers, and four cats, all long-haired, in our married life. Love them though we did, they accounted for a lot of vacuuming. Now, pet-less, we vacuum less often.

Eighty years without vacuuming wouldn’t only mean accumulations of animal (and human) hair or fur. There would a variety of living organisms growing in dark corners, not to mention feet-lacerating legos, broken glass, and little piles of hardened play-dough. You get the idea. A royal mess. A deep royal mess.

“Well,” she said, “that’s kind of the shape our forests are in. After 80 to 100 years of fire suppression, lots of stuff has built up. So that now when there’s a fire, there’s so much accumulated fuel that fires explode and become, at least some become, mega-fires.”

That said, “vacuuming” the forest floor isn’t an easy thing to accomplish. There are some areas here in the County where efforts have been made to reduce the build up of flammable material in the forest understory. But when you’ve pushed that stuff into big piles and heaps, it’s still not easy to know what to do with it. Some are trying to get businesses going that use the debris. Other times, the piles themselves are burned under controlled conditions, but that’s obviously not without risk.

I walked up the hill, mountain really, behind us the other day. A thousand feet up, there’s a new road to an area has been platted as a sub-division. Will it become one? I don’t know. What I do know is that up there the forest is littered with dozens of down and dead trees, as well as smaller tinder. Fuel waiting for the spark, which a big construction project could easily provide.

Fire is on the minds of people here. We’ve all seen pictures of Lahina, Paradise, of the MacKenzie River valley east of Eugene. People now regularly tell stories of their home/ cabin insurance doubling or tripling in a year. In some cases, they can no longer get insurance on their dwellings at all.

And yet, in this scenic corner of far northeastern Oregon (powered by many articles in Sunset, NYT and Oregon tourism promos), density increases, limited infra-structure is overtaxed, sub-divisions are platted. New homes are constructed, some according to the specs of the Forest Service’s Fire Wise program, some not. It’s a dilemma. It stands to reason that increased density in such an area heightens the risk of fire, not to mention the consequences if there is a fire. (Did I mention there’s one two-lane highway for everyone entering and exiting?) And yet people have been holding onto a piece of property to sell to cushion their retirement, while others want to build or buy their long-coveted dream house.

It is, in a way, a microcosm of the climate crisis. We want to do what we’ve always done, including building more and bigger, driving more and bigger cars and trucks. But we kind of know we can’t or shouldn’t. Some dismiss the threat calling it, in the words of Donald Trump, “a hoax.” It takes a special kind of mental gymnastic to argue that with evidence of global warming virtually all around us.

Adding more dwellings in more remote areas, close to National Forests and Wilderness, in addition to a century of fire suppression, is part of the problem. How do you take needed collective action in a society where private property rights are sacrosanct (not without reason)? Maybe the insurance companies, by denying coverage, will be a hammer of change?

There is good work going on. The Fire Wise program provides home inspections helping people to reduce risks and hazards. The Wallowa County Land Trust provides economically feasible ways to realize income from private property without developing it. People like my wife go to County Planning Commission meetings to learn what is going on, to allay rumors and to voice concerns.

But the haze hovers, making it hard to deny that there’s a problem.