Western Washington state is one of the wettest places in the country. In the North Cascade mountains and on the Olympic Peninsula, lush cedars, ferns and mosses form classic Pacific Northwest rainforests. But even here, climate change is making wildfires more likely. And the state is figuring out how to respond.
“It used to be that it really wasn’t until mid-August that fuels dried out in western Washington,” said Derek Churchill, a forest health scientist at the Washington Department of Natural Resources. “Now it’s July or earlier.” In fact, last month human activity started a wildfire in the Olympic national forest. As of Tuesday, it had grown to more than 5,100 acres and some campgrounds were under evacuation orders.
Fire in western Washington is not a natural part of the ecosystem’s annual rhythm, as it is for drier grasslands and pine forests in the eastern part of the state. Instead, every few hundred years, a megafire strikes, burning hundreds of thousands of acres, replacing whole forests with slopes of charred spindles.
But global warming is changing fire patterns in the state. Washington’s summers are growing longer, hotter and drier, resulting in an extended fire season with more desiccated fuel available. Paired with swelling populations throughout Puget Sound, it’s a recipe for more frequent annual fires.
More frequent fires in turn increase the odds, slightly but surely, that a megafire will occur. The only question is timing.
As a result, forest managers and firefighters are keeping a wary eye on smaller fires like the Bear Gulch fire burning in the Olympics. The last megafire razed western Washington in the early 20th century. More recent fires have been smaller, but concerning. In 1978, more than 1,000 acres burned in the Hoh Rainforest, which can receive as much annual precipitation as the wettest reaches of the Amazon Rainforest. In 2015, more than 2,000 acres of the Olympic rainforest caught fire along the Queets River before fall rains extinguished it.
The recent fires in wet forests were “a wake-up call,” said Kyle Smith, the Washington state director of forest conservation at The Nature Conservancy, which manages several forest sites around the state. “It was alarming to see fire burning in the Queets valley.”
A 2022 fire in the Cascades raised alarm bells, too. It burned along a highway some 60 miles from Seattle, in a popular spot for hiking.
State forest managers are now figuring out how to respond to two problems simultaneously: a changing fire season with increased odds of smaller, more frequent fires, and the threat of the next megafire in its rainforests.
While there are time-tested strategies to fight fires in dry eastern Washington — with its grasslands and stands of Douglas fir and ponderosa pine — wet, rugged western Washington is a different beast altogether.
“Folks think the recipe for the east will work in the west, and it does not,” said George Geissler, the top forester for Washington state. “It’s way more complicated.”
Fires in the west grow slowly but steadily, smoldering as they feed on feet-thick layers of crispy moss and decaying cedar. Steep terrain and thick vegetation limit what firefighters can do on the ground; a dense canopy can block water and fire retardant from being delivered by air.
The job is so much tougher in the west that a firefighting team needs about four times as many people for a fire of the same size in eastern Washington, said Tim Sampson, a deputy division manager for wild lands fire for Washington state.
Fire breaks, or strips of cleared-out vegetation, can help keep a fire from spreading. In arid eastern Washington, a fire break might be good for decades. But in the wet half of the state, digging through all the dead vegetation on the forest floor is excruciating and slow work. And vegetation grows back so quickly that the break would likely disappear in a year or two.
“Out here, I could put a stick in the ground and it would grow,” Geissler said.
One big risk to overall forest health in Washington is drought, Churchill said. Restoring streams and removing invasive species can reduce competition among trees for water, making them less vulnerable to drought — and therefore less likely to dry out and burn.
Getting community support to manage forests can be difficult, especially in places where living with fire is relatively new, Smith said. Some residents see tree thinning and forest clearing as environmentally damaging. Pairing thinning with ecosystem restoration, which also benefits salmon and other species, can be an easier sell.
But planning for megafires requires an entirely different approach than fighting annual fires.
“The big fires that have occurred in the past are fires we can’t fight,” Geissler said. Firefighters can’t put out a wildfire that covers 100,000 acres of steep, inaccessible mountains. Instead, much of their planning is focused on identifying high-risk places to protect, like communities, and spots where fire breaks should be created in the event of a big fire.
Emergency planners have found that wildfire risk awareness among western Washington residents is mixed, as is their receptiveness to hearing about the dangers. Trying to improve public awareness, then, is an important part of the state’s planning around both increased annual fire risk and the potential for a megafire.
The state is trying to finalize its plans for dealing with its new wildfire reality at the same time there has been an uptick in fire incidents in western Washington. That stretches firefighting resources and requires officials to try to stay one step ahead of fires, putting teams and gear in place in the highest-risk spots.
“The biggest challenge we have is folks believing ‘it could never happen here,’” Geissler said. “The hardest thing to do is to get people to realize they’re part of it.”
