Wildfire season has arrived in the Northwest, a little earlier than usual. Washington Lands Commissioner Dave Upthegrove told reporters in Airway Heights this week that his agency’s crews responded to about 20 fires during Memorial Day weekend. All were human-caused.
The Spokane and Colville Tribes have taken a proactive approach to the summer fire season. They’ve already banned fireworks in most settings.
Cody Desautel is the executive director of the Colville Confederated Tribes.
Cody Desautel: Our Tribal elected officials, our Tribal council really considers the potential impacts, the risks associated with fireworks use. If it looks like it's a bad idea, we'll make the decision proactively early in the year to ban those so that people know ahead of time, don't go buy fireworks from outside vendors or Tribal vendors buying them to sell at a later date.
Again, just trying to be proactive so that the folks in the community are aware and can make other plans accordingly—so that we don't run into those few individuals sometimes that make bad choices because they already had them and they want to use them and they think it's probably going to be okay. That's not always the case.
Doug Nadvornick: I think that the response to that has already been...
CD: Largely what we've heard from our membership is support for it. I think they recognize a potentially bad season on the horizon and so what we've heard so far is, ‘Good decision. We're glad you did it now.’
Colville has more experience with catastrophic fire than anywhere else in the state. If you go back to even just 2015 for us, we've seen 900,000 acres of a 1.4 million acre reservation burn in a decade. So our membership is particularly aware of the potential of wildfire and what those impacts are.
DN: So what's this spring been like so far in terms of fires?
CD: Fairly light, although our snowpack was really low. Looking at the SNOTEL data—so we've got a site that measures snowpack and snow water equivalent—we were at about a third of where we typically are.
So we recognized that early and we had a little bit of prescribed fire done this spring. Not as much as we'd have liked to, but recognizing we were coming into a potentially dangerous wildfire season and that other parts of the country were starting to warm up, that it maybe was best that we not have any holdover fires from prescribed fire this spring.
So we got a little bit done, but not as much as we'd have liked to. With the conditions forecasted for the summer, we thought it was probably best to go ahead and stop early. And make sure we had everything buckled down and ready to go into July and August, which is typically the heart of our fire season.
Desautel says the Colville Tribes’ experiences over the last decade have changed how it approaches fire now.
CD: We do a good job with land use planning, so we don't allow people to build out in the wildland urban interface, but lots of other places do. So when we see suppression resources get allocated, they tend to send them to places like Lake Chelan or Cle Elum and places that have a lot of development out in the wildland.
What that means is we can protect our communities, but once it's kind of burned away from the communities, we tend not to see a lot of support. We end up being low priority because we don't have life and property at risk, which is always priority number one outside the initial attack when they're determining where suppression resources should go. That's a challenge for us, so we try to do as much work ahead of the season as we can to keep fires either small or reduce the post-fire impacts.
I think that's really been a shift in our management over the last four or five years that we thought we were doing the right things for a long time. Then the 2015 fire season hit and we burned 255,000 acres and have since reconsidered what we're doing and kind of shifted our focus more from fire prevention and suppression to how do we create landscapes that can accept fire.
You have post-fire conditions that are more consistent with what we've seen historically when tribal people got to use fire on a very regular interval, keep fuels reduced, keep fire risk reduced, and shifted our focus towards that. But it's a bit challenging because that's not really the way the regulations are written or the way that fuels funding gets allocated through the BIA, so we're hoping to correct some of those things with this new wildland fire service.
DN: Are you in better shape now than you were 10 years ago, 11 years ago?
CD: Absolutely. We've started to see the switch. So although we're seeing fairly large acreages still burn at Colville, we're seeing much lower percentages of high-severity fire. And we did better than most because of the work we'd done since, really, the 1980s when we shifted our forest management approach.
If you look at much of that Swawilla fire from 2024, although it was over 53,000 acres, more than half of it was really beneficial fire. So that's really become our goal. How do we recognize that we're not going to get resources? How do we create a landscape that is resilient to fire and post-fire impacts that are more consistent with what we'd have seen historically and really becomes that fire-adapted ecosystem like we knew as tribal people? And trying to recreate that within, again, the funding and policy limitations we have.
