Fire officials are celebrating the fact that a blaze that burned the hillside above Spokane’s Cemetery Row last week was in a treed area that had been prepared for wildfire. On Monday, state and local fire officials went back to the area to take a look.
The Washington Department of Natural Resources says the Upper Cemetery fire covered 44 acres. It’s an area bounded above by train tracks and below by the Palisades Christian Academy.
“This section of the fire that was burning was the heaviest, most intense. It was throwing the most embers onto the school and the homes down below. They actually had firefighters on the roof of the school putting out embers,” said Nick Jeffries, the wildland resource planner for the Spokane Fire District.
The area nearest the school had not been thinned, he says. The rest, about 38 acres, had been treated, some in 2013, some during the last year.
“We have city ownership. We did a railroad parcel. We did some state parks on the north side. And as we’ve worked our way back here, we’ve done a lot of city ownership and we’ve done the cemetery ownership,” Jeffries said.
Smaller trees were cut. On the larger trees that were left, lower limbs were removed.
“The retardant was able to penetrate. The firefighters were able to be effective and safe and we just had a lot more success in the area that was treated. That’s why this is such an exciting little piece, because this section that was burned, was actually less risk for everybody,” Jeffries said.
He says the Cemetery Row area that burned is part of a 430-acre parcel that has received recent attention. He says other forest thinning projects are planned around Spokane County during the next year. That includes 500-1,000 acres within the city of Spokane, with other projects planned in the Elk/Chattaroy area and in south Spokane Valley.
Jeffries was joined on the tour by some of his Spokane Fire Department colleagues, representatives from Fire District 10, Mayor Lisa Brown and representatives from DNR.
“What we’re trying to do is eliminate that continuum of fuel horizontally and vertically by limbing up trees and creating crown spacing, keeping that fire on the ground where we can get the people to dig line in and get dozers in there,” said Thomas Randall, the agency’s forest health specialist.
Also on the tour was Lands Commissioner Hilary Franz, who worked with the legislature to add millions of dollars to the state budget for forest health and wildfire prevention projects. She says the state has treated 800,000 acres statewide during the last six years as part of DNR’s 20-year Forest Health Strategic Plan for eastern and central Washington. That’s about two-thirds of its one-and-a-quarter million acre goal. It hopes to attain that goal by the end of this decade, several years earlier than scheduled.
“There’s a whole lesson that can be learned post-fire,” Franz said to her DNR and Spokane colleagues. “You guys, I know, are going to be out here walking this fire to see what treatment worked, how did it work, where were other areas? We do that work every time there’s a fire that hits an area. We’ve done a forest health treatment, we go back into that landscape to say, ‘Did we get it right?”
Franz praised Spokane County as a statewide leader in the wildfire prevention realm. It’s one of 13 counties participating in the Wildfire Ready Neighbors program, which teaches property owners how to fireproof their homes by clearing space and choosing non-combustible landscaping materials.
