Major wildfire waiting to happen?

YAKIMA, Wash. — As often as weather and wind conditions permit over the next several years, state and federal land managers intend to start well-controlled fires in the forests west of Yakima.

They'll burn 100 acres here, a few dozen acres there, each time briefly turning the skies hazy with smoke. And people will complain.

But the alternative, they say, is to await a catastrophic wildfire that could turn mile after mile of those thickly forested slopes into black ash.

And the skies? You wouldn't see a patch of blue for weeks.

Case in point: 1994 in Chelan County, when four wildfires burning simultaneously -- one of them human-caused, three of them ignited by lightning strikes -- burned more than 280 square miles, destroyed 37 homes, forced the evacuation of 2,700 others and threatened several towns.

In the Entiat Valley, firefighters watched in awe as raging fire ripped 120-foot alders from the ground and tossed them around like toothpicks, often in spiraling patterns as if by a tornado.

Wildfire raced through the Icicle Canyon outside of Leavenworth in capricious patterns, seemingly torching every other home while leaving the ones in between untouched.

Firefighters desperately hoping Blewett Pass Highway would stop the fire watched helplessly as the blaze roared toward them and then across the roadway. Only a shift in weather stopped the fire's progress toward Cashmere.

It was weeks before anybody saw blue sky.

Or thought of exercising outdoors.

Or so much as drove with the car windows down.

*****

What do those fires have to do with us here now?

This: Experts say Yakima County has the potential for equally devastating wildfires.

The details are explicit in the county's draft Community Wildfire Protection Plan, in which the county's "risk assessment" map is nearly all orange, indicating high fire risk; the northwest corner is entirely red, for extreme risk.

Without the proactive measures called for by the plan -- from controlled burns to actions owners can take to protect their vacation cabins -- experts say huge swaths of forests west of Yakima could go up in flames.

And be gone for decades.

In Forest Service circles, the Naches and Cle Elum districts are sometimes referred to as the "asbestos districts" for having eluded the huge fires that have so often struck elsewhere in Washington -- in Chelan County in 1988 and 1994, at Hanford in 2000, in the north and east corners of the state in 2001 and the southwest in 2005, and in the Okanogan Valley in 2006.

But the forested foothills west of Yakima pose fire danger "every bit as problematic" as Chelan County's 1994 fires, said Naches Ranger District fire fuels specialist Jim Bailey.

Although fighting those fires was complicated by more rugged topography, he said, the Naches District's dense forests provide "more continuous fuel" to sustain wildfire.

It's not a matter of if, but when, according to Mike Rowan of the Naches Ranger District.

"I think we all kind of keep waiting. We get through another year and we think, wow, we dodged that bullet again," he said. "But the stats are the stats. Eventually we're going to get a fire up there.

"And it's going to be big."

******

Wildfire has its uses. It can keep a forest in balance, cleaning out the underbrush that can drown out the new growth, leaving clearings that become natural fire-breaks and creating habitat that supports a wide and healthy variety of animal and plant life.

But a century of organized fire suppression took away those regular visits by smaller, less-intense fires and left forests susceptible to the kind of huge, landscape-changing fires that were once a rarity.

In the Pacific Northwest, what were once open stands of fire-resistant ponderosa pine are now heavily fueled with stands of grand fir, weakened and dried out by dwarf mistletoe, spruce budworm and bark beetle blight.

In many places, the ground is so thick with underbrush and tinder-dry branches from long-dead trees that it's difficult to wade through.

And instead of open air between the ground and tree foliage, there are multiple layers of canopy -- the very kind of fuel that creates the catastrophic fires now being seen, Bailey said.

Since 1997, the United States has seen 68 fires of 100,000 or more acres -- a size only rarely occurring from the 1930s through the 1970s. From 1960 through 1999, only once did U.S. wildfires burn in excess of
7 million acres in a year. That total has been exceeded in six of the last nine years, and four of the last five.

It's not only the forest that would be at risk. There are more than 550 summer homes on the Naches Ranger District, which doesn't include such rural communities as Cliffdell, Goose Prairie and most of the Nile.

More people and homes in areas susceptible to wildland fires means more resources being deployed to protect them, potentially taking fire crews away from less- or non-populated areas where the fire might then spread.

And if it continues to spread, well ...

"When we lose a forest like that, it takes a long time, 80 to 100 years, to get a forest back that we recognize or call as such," said Richy Harrod, fire ecologist for the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. "All you have to do is drive up the Entiat Valley and look.

"They have no forest left."

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