Wildfire mitigation projects are becoming more common around the Northwest. Governments are allocating millions of dollars to land management and fire agencies that are targeting overgrown forests.
This week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it has awarded about $35 million to five projects in eastern Washington and north Idaho designed to thin forests in urban-rural interface areas and teach homeowners who live there how to protect their homes and other assets.
Two of those grants are going to Spokane County agencies, with the Spokane Valley Fire Department collecting $5.5 million.
“We wanted something that would improve community safety through fuels reduction projects and we wanted to look at the protection of critical infrastructure,” said Deputy Fire Marshal Ken Johnson.
The department’s grant also includes an education component for landowners.
“We would have specialists ready to help. For example, a forester who is trained in the best practices could come in and guide those folks on the next steps,” he said.
The Spokane Conservation District received the county’s largest grant, about $9 million.
Garth Davis, the district’s forestry program manager, says the district will distribute much of its money to agencies such as the Spokane County Parks Department, the Dishman Hills Conservancy and the Washington Department of Natural Resources to fund their projects. He says it may also share the cost of wildfire prevention projects with private landowners.
Davis says the Spokane agencies doing this work are coordinating their projects to treat the most dangerous areas.
“The Spokane County Wildfire Mitigation Coalition was brought together so that we can be on the same page and network and know what everybody else is doing and to go after funding like this federal funding as a group of partners, instead of just one entity trying to spend a lot of money,” he said.
Also in eastern Washington, the Okanogan County Electric Cooperative will collect more than $4 million to reduce the fire danger in the Methow Valley. The Columbia Land Trust is receiving money to treat nearly five thousand acres of its land on the Yakama Indian Reservation.
In north Idaho, the Department of Lands will focus on nearly 1,300 acres along Interstate 90 in Shoshone County.
These five were among 58 recipients nationwide to receive $200 million in grants awarded through the Department of Agriculture’s Wildfire Defense Grant Program.
Land managers say these projects are additions to work that has already been done, but not nearly enough to fireproof the region.
Davis says fire prevention work will need to become routine, given climate change and the area’s increasing vulnerability to wildfire.
“You can treat a property this year and it needs to be treated again in 10 years,” he said.
He also believes forest thinning projects should be done in tandem with prescribed burning to get the maximum benefit, but he says the region isn’t ready for that yet.
“All of Spokane is almost WUI now, wildland urban interface, and running [prescribed] fires in that area just makes everybody really nervous,” Davis said.
“But there are groups that are creating prescribed fire councils that will, hopefully, move in that direction. One of those prescribed fires needs to follow one of these fuels reduction treatments.You just can’t go lighting a thick forest on fire. You’ve got to reduce the fuels and then try to maintain them with fire.”
Davis says that may be years away, in part to condition people who live near cities to learn to live with the smoke that comes from low-level preventive fires in urban-rural interface areas.
