We must prepare for wildfires, says Greenwater fire chief. He doesn’t care about climate politics
Paul Sowers has vivid memories of the 2017 Norse Peak fire, which crested the east-west state divide near Crystal Mountain early that September.
Sparked by lightning on the east side of the Cascades, east winds eventually coaxed the blaze over the state’s mountainous spine. By the time it smoldered out, it had consumed more than 50,000 acres, roughly half of it on the west side of the mountains.
“We didn’t even see it until it was halfway down the ridge because the smoke level was so intense,” Sowers recalled Feb. 25 from inside a sparsely decorated fire station he mans with a team of volunteer firefighters along state Route 410.
Today, the Norse Peak fire is considered the largest fire on the west side of the mountains since the 1902 Yacolt Burn.
To Sowers, however, it feels more like a close call.
The volunteer fire chief in Greenwater and Crystal Mountain, Sowers is grateful the 2017 Norse Peak fire — which led to the evacuation of Crystal and nearby residences — was successfully contained. The large, the multi-agency response helped, as did a timely late-season change in the weather, Sowers explains.
So did years of training and local preparation, he adds.
An outhouse was consumed by flames, as was a shelter along Ranger Creek, but there were no injuries and no significant structural losses, Sowers recounts.
It could have been much worse, the fire chief says, not that he thinks people realize it.
Most Washington residents, Sowers believes, live under the false assurance of an old, outdated mantra: “The west side doesn’t burn.”
That’s “an incomplete saying,” Sowers says. “The west side doesn’t burn very often, but when it does burn it burns.
“That’s where we get the mega-fires, because the fuel load over here compared to the fuel load on the east side is off the charts.”
According to Sowers and officials with the state Department of Natural Resources, while wildland fires on the west side of the Cascades are still rare compared to fires on the east side, the last five or six years have foreshadowed a shift.
With a warming climate and an ever growing fire season, west side blazes appear to be becoming more common, the officials say.
According to statistics from the state Department of Natural Resources, while the numbers of acres burned by wildfires on the west side has fluctuated over the last decade, the number of wildfire starts has grown.
In 2010, according to DNR, 214 wildfires started on the west side, while 2011 saw 281 wildfire starts.
Since 2015, according to the agency, an average of 423 west side wildfires have started every year — with 491 in 2018 providing the decade high point.
Four of the five highest yearly totals for west side wildfire starts recorded over the last decade occurred between between 2015 and 2019, the DNR data shows.
In other words, the west side of the mountains does burn, as Sowers knows well, and the results can be devastating. When wildfires spark in the right (or wrong) conditions, dense, dried-out Western Washington forests provide ample kindling for a potentially massive blaze.
The Norse Peak blaze wasn’t a mega-fire — which can cover hundreds of thousands of acres — but the next time it might be, Sowers says, especially with the reality of climate change.
That’s why he believes the state needs to do much more to prepare, particularly in growing Western Washington communities sprawling out into our forests and mountains.
Sowers also believes Greenwater provides a model for how it can work.
“I don’t care what people’s politics are. I don’t care if you think it’s human-caused global warming. I don’t care if you think the world is just having one of its normal hot flashes,” Sowers says. “Doesn’t matter. The point is, it’s here.”
“How many times growing up here did you have days or weeks in August when the entire west side of Washington was covered in smoke? That’s not normal. That’s new,” Sowers says.
“So we need to address it as a new set of conditions and come up with new plans.”
Proactive approach to wildfire
Greenwater is far more prepared for the threat of wildland fire than many communities in the ever expanding wildland-urban interface, according to state Department of Natural Resources fire unit manager Charley Burns.
Burns would like to see that change, which is why he took time out of the field this week to talk about something as distant as a bill working its way through the state Legislature’s budget making process in Olympia.
The bill — HB 2413, which carries a fiscal note and is considered necessary to implement the budget — would create a permanent funding source for DNR’s wildfire crisis response. The money — an estimated $125 million every biennium, coming from a surcharge on property and casualty insurance policies — would go toward improving the state’s wildfire response capabilities and prevention efforts.
That would mean more full-time employees, essential equipment, training and community interaction across the region and state, Burns says.
Or, as Sowers more bluntly puts it, it would allow DNR to help other communities do “essentially what we’ve been doing up here (in Greenwater) for decades.”
In one way or another, Burns has been helping DNR battle wildfires in this region for more than 40 years. Currently, he’s a fire unit manager for the South Puget Sound Region.
Burns, 72, knows Sowers and Greenwater well, in part because he has an office just down the road in Enumclaw, not that he spends much time there.
Burns notes that Greenwater in 2002 became involved in a DNR pilot project designed to help communities prepare for the threat of wildfire.
He’s been here, helping almost every step of the way since.
While Burns acknowledges similar efforts in other communities have fizzled to varying extents in the years since, he says Greenwater stands in relatively good shape.
Why?
There are a few contributing factors, Burns says, but mostly he attributes small-town intangibles, bureaucratic realities and simple proximity.
Greenwater’s fire readiness, Burns says, is largely the result of a unique relationship forged between DNR, a volunteer fire department and a town eager and willing to proactively prepare.
Out here, where volunteer fire departments often serve as the first line of wildland fire response, collaboration is key, Burns says — particularly with more and more people moving further into urban-wildland areas every year. Eventually, DNR or the U.S. Forest Service likely will take the lead on battling a wildfire, but units and communities like Sowers’ serve as the first line of defense.
“We have recognized along with the Greenwater community the potential for fire here — for wildland-urban interface fire coming into the community,” Burns says of DNR’s involvement in Greenwater over the years, before recounting a nearly two-decade timeline that led to this point.
It’s a long, convoluted list, including multiple federal and state funding sources, varying levels of political concern, project phases and recession-related budgetary adjustments.
The end result, however, is cut and dried.
Over the years, Greenwater has continued to work with DNR on wildland fire prevention, while similar efforts have fallen off in other places.
So it’s a good example of what preparedness looks like, Burns says
As evidence of the progress in Greenwater, Burns points to the “shaded fuel breaks” carved into the nearby forest — where the canopy of trees has been thinned and limbed 15 feet into the air — creating a footing for firefighters to fend off flames coming down the mountain.
Just such a shaded fuel break stretches the length of roughly three football fields not far from Greenwater’s fire station, protecting the facility and the town. It’s one of several in the area.
Burns also highlights the training DNR has been able to do with Greenwater’s volunteer department and the DNR surplus firefighting vehicles that have rolled into town and found new life.
Most of all, Burns talks about the surrounding community’s knowledge and participation in prevention efforts, including important work done around homes and structures. Over the years, Burns says, DNR has collaborated with motivated residents to thin potential fuel sources. At one point, he estimates, more than half of Greenwater’s homes had been involved in the project.
It’s the kind of “proactive approach” Burns says the entire region needs, and what he believes a dedicated funding source could sustainably create.
“We were able to come in and be successful (in Greenwater), and we’re able to use that model in other communities,” Burns says.
‘A bunch of guys who just jumped off the lumber truck’
If Burns feels far removed from legislative action in Olympia, Sowers is a few stone throws from there.
At 60, Sowers is a barrel of a man with a thick beard and matter-of-fact one liner for most occasions. He has served as chief for the volunteer Greenwater Fire Department since 2004 after first volunteering for the department in 1995, following his move to the area.
Like many, Sowers was drawn to Greenwater by what he describes as a “mountain people” lifestyle. He worked as a firefighter for the Tacoma Fire Department until his retirement in 2017, considering the long commute to and from Pierce County’s farthest reaches worth the trade off.
“I’ve always wanted to live as much in the wilderness as I could,” Sowers says. “My wife says if I could have a cabin on top of a mountain 20 miles from anywhere, that’s where I’d be living.”
The volunteer department Sowers has overseen in Greenwater for the last 15 years is a far cry from what he experienced over his nearly three decades working for Tacoma Fire.
Between the Greenwater department and the volunteer Crystal Mountain department — which Sowers also became the chief of in 2015 — there are typically about 20 volunteer firefighters on his rolls.
Largely, he says, the volunteers — who rarely stay put long enough to count — are area residents who commit to extensive training and on-call readiness out of a devotion to their home and the wilderness that makes it unique.
Sowers proudly says the Greenwater volunteer fire department, first started in the 1970s, has “always done more than a small volunteer department should be able to do.”
The department’s founding members “looked like a bunch of guys who just jumped off the lumber truck,” he adds from the Greenwater station, which today doubles as a community center that can be rented for weddings and other public events.
The humble digs underscore the bare-bones but essential nature of Greenwater’s volunteer department. Funded through local property taxes and an EMS levy to the tune of roughly $200,000 a year, the department is tasked with responding to emergencies big and small in a largely seasonal mountain retreat.
Structure fires, heart attacks, tactical rescues and — yes — wildfires: the department handles it all.
While the 2010 Census awarded Greenwater a population of 67, records from the Pierce County Assessor Treasurer’s office reveal more than 500 taxable parcels, and 409 structures in the Greenwater Fire District. The Crystal Mountain Fire District is home to another 160 parcels and 146 structures..
The potential for injury, death or destruction of property and essential environment is significant, Sowers says, which is why community involvement and preparation are key.
“Everyone has to do their part. You can’t come out here and just expect to be passive and have the same resources protecting you that you have in the middle of Tacoma. If people come out here and expect that, they’re going to be disappointed, but we don’t really get that,” Sowers says.
“We get a more engaged community,” he continues. “They’re out here because there’s stuff out here that they love, and they’re pretty knowledgeable about nature. They’re pretty knowledgeable about mountains. They just need to have good communication, and they need to have a little bit of education.”
West side ‘no stranger to fire’
Scientifically speaking, Sowers is exactly right when he says the west side of Washington’s Cascade Mountains has the potential to burn long, hot and far.
“We think about fire in Washington, and it’s very obvious in many of our minds that fire is something that happens on the east side of the Cascades,” says Brian Harvey, an assistant professor at the University of Washington who studies environmental and forest sciences. “But on the west side, they’re no stranger to fire. It’s just on a different time scale.”
Harvey’s work has led him to study the 2017 Norse Peak fire, including the conditions that caused it and the forest’s regeneration. More broadly, Harvey’s research has helped to illuminate the significant history of large west side wildland fires, fleshing out a sketch of sometimes massive fires spread over centuries.
“When it does happen and when the conditions are right for fire, there’s good evidence to suggest fires can be quite large and quite severe (on the west side of the Cascades),” Harvey says.
Comparatively speaking, Harvey says, a patch of the forest on the east side of the mountains might burn every few years or decades, while a forest on the west side might burn every few hundred years or centuries.
Still, when forests on this side of the state do go up in flames — like the Yacolt Burn of 1902, which singed an estimated 500,000 acres — there’s a set of conditions that can quickly create a major fire event.
Forests on this side of the mountains, Harvey explains, are often packed with accumulated “biomass” — or burnable fuel. While flammable vegetation isn’t as prevalent in dryer, eastern areas of the state, on Washington’s west side, forests are often stuffed with it.
All it takes, Harvey says, is an ignition of some sort — typically lightning strikes or a man-made flame — combined with a protracted warm, dry period and gusts of east wind.
The hot, dry gusts from the east, Harvey says, are what has the potential to “kick fires into gear,” comparing the phenomenon to California’s Santa Ana winds.
“When the conditions are right on the west side, fuels have always been ready to burn,” Harvey says.
The ‘ingredients are all there’
Talk to Sowers, and he’ll tell you conditions are changing. That’s what worries him.
While Washington’s fire season has historically started on July 4 and stretched the next 100 days, in recent years, Sowers says, it’s been more like May Day to Columbus Day.
He doesn’t like the trend, which is why he says the state needs to proactively address and prioritize wildland fire prevention.
“California is just this model we can watch slowly going down the slope into devastation. Their fire season isn’t ending like it used to end,” Sowers says. “So far we’re still blessed with a climate in Western Washington where even though our fire seasons are getting worse, we do have something of a definitive end seasonally.
“But California used to have that, too, and that’s changing. It’s going to change up here, too.”
Sowers is clear: He has no use for the politics of climate change.
All he knows is what he sees on the ground and in the forests that surround his home and the community he protects, and it tells him it’s time for regional action.
When he looks back on the Norse Peak fire of 2017 and the catastrophe averted, he realizes what’s potentially at stake.
Researching the forest, Harvey sees some of the same warnings.
While Harvey says it’s difficult to know with historical certainty whether fires on the west side are becoming more frequent — particularly because large fires have been so rare — he says we can clearly document an increase in factors that contribute to major burns
With climate change, prolonged hot, dry summer periods are becoming more and more common. That means longer fire seasons on the west side and a greater likelihood that a dense, parched forest will combine with a spark and a strong, dangerous wind from the east.
“There’s evidence to suggest prompting elements — they’re all there,” Harvey says. “As the climate continues to warm, that’s just going to increase the period of time that those things would likely coincide.
“Yeah, there is much more reason to expect that fire is going to become more common on the west side of the Cascades than it has been in the last several decades, that’s for sure,” Harvey adds.
“Just because the ingredients are all there for it.”
