If you’re driving along U.S. Highway 12, there’s a chance you’ve seen a pipe – dug into the cliff, about two-thirds the way up. That’s part of the 12-mile Yakima-Tieton Irrigation Canal, which snakes along the foothills and cuts through basalt columns.
“There's more water flowing in that canal than the Tieton River right now,” said Travis Okelberry, the district manager with the Yakima-Tieton Irrigation District.
The canal has been here for more than a century. And its storied history – hand dug by hundreds of workers – has helped the Yakima Valley’s agricultural industry to spring to life.
“ If this canal system fails, it will absolutely devastate the Yakima Valley,” Okelberry said.
Okelberry stood on the side of the highway, looking up at the canal. He said, all those years ago, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation “built this and put it in the most precarious location imaginable. There are no roads; there's very little access.”
That’s made maintenance tough. It’s been made even harder after the 2024 Retreat Fire burned through more than 45,000 acres.
Some of it burned in ways land managers said will make things healthier — like through prescribed burns.
However, along one side of the highway, the hillside was torched. With all that heat, the canal just didn’t stand a chance.
“There were logs and trees and boulders crashing (down) and rolling down through our canal system,” Okelberry said.
All of that tore apart the lining of the inside of the canal. Scalding and heat damage blistered the outside. Recent inspections showed at least 2,000 leaks, Okelberry said.
“Every day, we have eyes on the canal,” he said.
Remote alarms, trail cams and flood sensors alert the district to any major problems. The irrigation district has tried its best to plug what it can, Okelberry said. It’s just a ton of damage.
“It’s in bad shape right now,” he said.
For years, the irrigation district has worked on ways to update the canal.
“And then Mother Nature thought it'd be cool to light us on fire,” Okelberry said.
After the fire
But, as important as this canal is to the region, no one had drawn up plans on what to do if the area caught on fire, said Collin Haffey, the post-fire recovery manager for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources.
“ That's a failure of government and governance at all levels. It's a failure at the state level; it's a failure at the local level; and it's a failure at the district level,” he said.
However, he said, Yakima County has since added this canal to its Hazard Mitigation Plan, he said. That’s important because it was the biggest risk for downstream communities post-fire, he said.
Haffey’s gig is about two and a half years old. He’s here to help with recovery post-fire, running one of the first official state recovery teams in the country. One big goal: for people to have a plan to recover post-fire, with help.
“Recovery is hard. Recovery is slightly less hard when you know the steps,” Haffey said.
Post-fire recovery is like heading straight from a sprint into a marathon, he said.
Haffey’s team helped find around $5 million to start repairing the canal. Most of the funding came from the Washington State Department of Commerce and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Still, more funding is needed.
Fixing the canal is an expensive and complicated process. With the help of helicopters, the preferred option would replace the upper half of the canal with a box culvert and the lower half with an underground tunnel.
Okelberry has scrambled to find funding for those fixes, requesting around $240 million emergency maintenance loan from the Bureau of Reclamation and reaching out to local, state and federal lawmakers.
“My message to elected officials all along is: Don’t let this become a disaster that you knew about,” he said.
But this fire didn’t destroy everything.
How fire can help the landscape
Across the highway, the 2024 Retreat Fire burned in a very different way. Land managers said this fire is an example of both “bad” and “good” versions of fire.
“This is really kind of the tale of two fires,” said Derek Churchill, a forest health scientist with the state’s Department of Natural Resources.
The Oak Creek Wildlife Area, which is located about a half-hour drive northwest of Yakima, fared much better for a big reason, he said.
Over the years, various land managers have worked to make these stands — patches of trees within a forest — healthier. The result is a mosaic of burn severity, instead of dead trees and hydrophobic soil all around.
Before that earlier work, the forest was too dense, said Reese Lolley, with the nonprofit Washington Resource Conservation and Development Council.
Fire was kept off the landscape for so long that the forest became unhealthy. It needs fire, Lolley said.
“ The wildlife, the water, the ecological systems here, were born in fire,” Lolley said.
When it’s not so big and catastrophic, he says fires are good for the land.
Since time immemorial, Indigenous people have used fire to keep the landscape healthy, like through controlled burns.
State and federal agencies are working to ramp up this type of “good fire.” They’re thinning patches of forest and burning piles of cured wood they’ve chopped off trees. Ideally, they’re also using prescribed burns when the weather and conditions are right.
Those strategies are why this piece of land isn’t scorched.
‘Key outcomes’
In a stand that’s a short hike up the hillside, the trees survived this fire, unlike many across the highway. There’s one that’s at least 320 years old. Garrett Meigs, a Department of Natural Resources forest health scientist, drilled a core of the tree.
“That's an old ponderosa pine,” he said. “You can think of this stand as emblematic of the key outcomes of beneficial work of wildfire following treatments. And it's not just one treatment - it's multiple rounds of treatment followed by maintenance over time.”
There are clumps of trees, lots of open space and minimal combustible materials on the ground. Land managers said this is what they’d like to see. But it’s not easy.
Right now, funding is a huge challenge, said Matt Eberlein, who manages prescribed fires for Washington’s Department of Fish and Wildlife. He said his program is back to a shoestring budget.
“ We had just enough budget to keep everybody's positions,” Eberlein said. “So then the question comes down to: ‘Well, what about implementation?’”
Things are tight at agencies all around. However, Eberlein said they plan to look for grants and other funding sources. He said they’ll make new burn plans for different areas so that when the money is available, they know what areas need the most help. That way, they can keep improving the health of Washington lands.
More work to be done
Here, with several agencies working on their own patches of land, about 20 percent of the Oak Creek watershed has had some type of thinning or prescribed burns, according to the Department of Natural Resources. The state has goals of treating more than that – sometimes double.
Most fires are human-caused, and this type of work helps reduce fire intensity and damage, Eberlein said.
“We have to manage it one way or another. And if we don't, Mother Nature will,” Eberlein said.
Agencies eventually have to come back and treat the land. Lolley said looking ahead, the land is going to need even more of this sort of treatment to help firefighters manage future wildfires as the climate continues to change, which increases the difficulty of putting wildfires out.
"All predictions moving forward (indicate) we're going to see a lot more fire,” Lolley said.
Or else, he said, more areas could look like the scorched forest across the highway. More infrastructure could see catastrophic damage, like the Yakima-Tieton Irrigation Canal.
