A little more than 300 years ago, approximately 3 to 10 million acres of forest were burned in Western Washington. A state Department of Natural Resources scientist warns that a series of catastrophic fires like that will strike Western Washington again, but no one knows when.
During Thursday’s Washington State Society of American Foresters annual meeting in the Cowlitz County Expo Center, DNR scientist and University of Washington professor Daniel Donato spoke about how Western Washington needs to be prepared for massive, landscape-altering fires.
And Donato said there’s not a lot anybody will be able to do to control or stop them.
“These are the type of fires, that even under modern fire suppression … we’d back away and say, ‘Everybody has to pull out and watch it do its thing,’ ” he said. “It’s basically a hurricane or an earthquake at that point.”