The wildfires of 2014 were the worst in Washington state history. One obvious lesson that year was that our state should ramp up its firefighting capacity to better respond to forest fires. Clearly our region’s climate was changing and our forests were becoming more diseased and tinder dry.
Our Legislature, caught in a financial and political squeeze over school funding in early 2015, didn’t heed the warnings Mother Nature was sending.
State Lands Commissioner Peter Goldmark asked for a modest $4.5 million to boost the number of Department of Natural Resources firefighters available, but he got only $1.2 million. That money didn’t come until July, when fires were already burning. Goldmark thinks a better fire-response capacity would have limited this year’s damage.
Instead, history repeated itself. The wildfires of 2015 are now the worst in Washington state history. They didn’t really stop burning in eastern areas of the state until mid-October, and many Eastern Washington residents may never get the smoke smell out of their memory.
Flames licked at the outskirts of cities like Chelan and too close to Wenatchee in the north-central state. Smoke choked highways. Evacuations were common.
More than 1 million acres of land burned in 59 fires.
Some 307 homes were destroyed.
Three firefighters with the U.S. Forest Service died.
Even old growth trees in the Olympic Peninsula’s rain forest caught fire — one more signal our climate is getting different.
The cost was huge for those who lost homes. The state’s cost overruns for fire-suppression is a record $137 million. The Legislature must cover that when it reconvenes in January.