For more than 20 years, people have wanted to protect White Salmon, Washington, from wildfires. The idea came about to build a fuel break around the entire town, kind of like a moat.
This shaded fuel break will still leave the forest healthy and give fire crews a place to fight from when the next wildfire hits.
“In the end, not only will we have a lower risk of wildfire, but we'll also have a healthier ecosystem overall,” said Alison Martin, the southeast region service forestry coordinator for the state’s Department of Natural Resources.
The 117-acre project has been split into three phases. Now, crews are thinning the second phase of mixed-conifer oak forest with chainsaws and masticators, which chew through forest debris.
However, they won’t leave the ground clear of all vegetation. Instead, crews are pruning tree limbs at least 10 feet high. They’ll also remove any trees that are 8 inches in diameter or smaller, Martin said.
The tree crowns should be 10 to 15 feet apart, she said. They’ll go back through with chippers or masticators to chew up the debris.
But in other areas of the fuel break, there are mostly oak trees. There, the canopies are typically more closed, Martin said, and the trees are more fire resistant. In those spots, crews will remove trees that are 4 inches in diameter or smaller.
A similar idea was originally proposed in 2004, but Martin said it took some time to get landowners to buy in. “We couldn’t gain traction,” she said.
Then, several wildfires threatened the area. For instance, 2023’s Tunnel 5 fire “scares the living daylights out of everybody,” Martin said.
That kicked off the first part of the fuel break project, she said. Now, work is finally underway. The entire thing is expected to be completed this fall, Martin said.
The state has fully funded the $600,000 project through grants, including a National Fire Preparedness grant and a Community Wildfire Defense grant.
“ It’s just a really unique example where everything lined up at the perfect time with community support, capacity (and) the funding to make it a really successful project,” said Charlie Landsman, community resilience coordinator for the Department of Natural Resources.
For a long time, Lloyd Dekay has wanted a fire break to be built. His house backs up to a roughly 45-degree slope that runs down to Washington state Route 14. In the past, fires have started there, he said.
Dekay moved into his home in 2007. Since then, he’s thinned the 200 oak saplings on his property, and his home has been threatened twice by fires.
“ We're in fairly good shape that way, but there's a lot of underbrush,” he said. “ They're actually going (to) be going all the way down to the highway, which is really a key thing.”
In addition to the fuel break, Dekay’s neighborhood has worked to become more firewise over the past three years, using a $4,000 grant from the Department of Natural Resources to cut vegetation near their homes and add gravel to their yards.
Those state and federal grants have been key to preparing the community for future fires, said Marla Keethler, the mayor of White Salmon. However, she said, inconsistencies with funding can make the work hard to do.
For now, the work continues. The large-scale fuel break is fully funded through 2028.
The addition of White Salmon’s fuel break will only increase fire resiliency, Landsman said.
“We can be really effective at working with individual landowners to protect their home or their assets, but when you have an entire community working on it, it just compounds the effectiveness of these treatments, doing it on this scale,” he said.
