WWU’s Michael Medler Testifies on Wildfire Risk to Senate Committee on Natural Resources
Western Washington University associate professor of Environmental Studies Michael Medler on Thursday, Aug. 27 testified before a special meeting of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee led by U.S. Sens. Maria Cantwell of Washington and John Barasso of Wyoming in the wake of the record-setting fires plaguing the West this summer.
Medler, himself a former wildlands firefighter whose research expertise lies in mapping and modeling wildfires, told the senators that the current system of attempting to fight every fire is unsustainable.
“Trying to fight every big fire is just not practical,” he said. “The Forest Service estimates that we need to reduce the fuel loads on about 400 million acres, an area about the size of Alaska, and fire is the only way we can really do that.”
In his testimony he explained that in order to live with more fire in the backcountry the nearby communities are going to need to be safer from those fires.
“What is surprising is that a quarter-mile buffer around every town in the Western U.S. is less than 9 million acres, an area about the size of Maryland. By thinning and preparing near these communities, we can start to manage bigger fires and restore ecosystems on the millions of other acres in the backcountry.”
“It’s a much more realistic number and also represents putting real effort into making communities more resilient,” he said.
Medler also said the current system referred to as “fire borrowing” – using funds from the U.S. Forest Service’s mitigation and preparation budgets that could be reducing wildfire risk to pay for the firefighting budget each summer was a self-defeating strategy.
“Those two aspects need to work together to be successful,” he said.
To put the last two fire seasons in perspective, last summer’s Carlton Complex fire north of Lake Chelan set a record as the single largest wildfire in Washington state history; but the Okanagan Complex fire burning now is about twice the size of the former record holder.
However Medler is concerned that future fires might be even bigger and more destructive.
“If the interaction between climate change, fuel build-up, and the construction of communities deeper into these sorts of flammable landscapes continues, instead of counting homes burned in the hundreds, we could be counting them in the tens of thousands. And those are the kinds of fires that keep me up and night.” he said.
“If we don’t use more low-intensity fires to clear out the fuel that has been built up, these massive fires will continue, and the size of them will only grow. There’s a reason we used to talk about these fires in terms of acres, but now we use square miles. They are just getting bigger and bigger,” he said.
“Anyone who has fought a fire like these will tell you, you don’t put out huge fires. You steer them when you can, you try to manage them, you chase them … but only weather and geography will put them out,” Medler said.
For more information on Medler’s testimony to the Senate committee or research on Western wildfire risk, contact him at (360) 650-3173 or Michael.medler@wwu.edu.