western wildfires

Wildfires burning across the West have now attracted the attention of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. They asked Western governors…

“Wildfire is presenting an imminent threat to life, property, and the environment, and we need all hands on deck,” Gov. Brad Little said in a statement. “I appreciate our firefighters and fire managers for working so hard under such challenging conditions, and I am grateful that our guardsmen are able to step in once again to support Idaho communities.”

The National Interagency Fire Center said Tuesday that it’s the second earliest it reached what it calls preparedness level 4 on the 1-5 scale since 1990. It’s also only the fourth time in the last 20 years that it has reached the level 4 in June.

Just about every indicator of drought is flashing red across the western U.S. after a dry winter and warm early spring. The snowpack is at less than half of normal in much of the region. Reservoirs are being drawn down, river levels are dropping and soils are drying out.

U.S. officials said Thursday they will try to stamp out wildfires as quickly as possible this year as severe drought tightens its grip across the West and sets the stage for another destructive summer of blazes.

As the company weighs its options, two Washington state legislators sent a letter Tuesday to U.S. Congress members in Western states, urging them to find a solution to continue the SuperTanker’s operations, which they described as the “biggest and one of the best weapons in battling the catastrophic fires.”

In the decades since government restrictions reduced logging on federal lands, the timber industry has promoted the idea that private lands are less prone to wildfires, saying that forests thick with trees fuel bigger, more destructive blazes. But an analysis by OPB and ProPublica shows last month’s fires burned as intensely on private forests with large-scale logging operations as they did, on average, on federal lands that cut fewer trees.

“In this year of, well, exceptions, we’ve been handed an unprecedented level of damage to our wildlife mitigation program,” a Washington state wildlife biologist recently told the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.

Experts warn that Western states and the federal government need to radically increase the number and size of controlled burns to help reduce the ongoing risks of more catastrophic wildfire seasons.

Many homeowners who lost everything in a wildfire had no idea they were at risk. Only two states require disclosing wildfire risk to buyers in the house hunting process.