My podcast today will provide a weekend weather forecast and talk about the history of wildfires in the Pacific Northwest.
Wildfires and related wildfire smoke are a major concern in the region, and some media, politicians and others have suggested that wildfires and wildfire smoke are unusual and a potential sign. of the changing climate.
They are not correct. Wildfires and their smoke are a natural part of the Northwest ecosystem.
What is unusual is the period when the fire was extinguished at the end of the 20th century.
A good illustration is Mark Twain’s visit in August 1895, a summer in which the United States Weather Service noted “the sun was almost completely obscured by the excessive smoke from the wildfires.”
Twain was invited to speak at Olympia, where the chair of the reception committee apologized for “the smoke is so thick you can’t see our mountains and forests, which are on fire”. Twain retorted
“As for the smoke, I don’t mind too much, I’m used to it. I myself am a permanent smoker”.
Fire zone
There are many studies, some based on underground charcoal deposits and others from the cores of tree rings, that fire has been a constant feature of our region for millennia.
This work has found that the western forest typically burns every few hundred years and the eastern forest every decade or so. Wildfires are an essential part of the Northwest ecosystem, something well known to Native Americans, who regularly caught fires to improve the productivity of the landscape.
When European explorers and settlers arrived in the area hundreds of years ago, they frequently commented on the summer wildfires.
For example, in August 1788, European explorers sailing up the Northwest coast noted large smoke from large fires (Indians, Fire and Earth in the Pacific Northwest, edited by Robert Boyd, 1999)
A year later, the Great Fire of 1845 consumed the northern half of Lincoln County and the southern half of Tillamook County, Oregon, destroying much of the area’s aged timber (1.5 million acres). In 1853, the Yaquina Fire engulfed 450,000 acres, followed by the Silverton Fire of 1865 (millions of acres) and the Coos Fire of 1868 (300,000 acres), all west of Oregon.
September 1868 was a very bad year for fire and smoke. Residents of Olympia, Portland and Oregon are forced to use lights during the day to carry out normal activities because the smoke is so dense and dark.
I could provide dozens of newspaper and magazine reports documenting the characteristic smoky summers of the Pacific Northwest, on both sides of the Cascades.
This smoke and fire regime continued into the early 20th century, until the great wildfire of 1910, the Great Fire, burned a large area in eastern WA, northern Idaho, and western Montana. An event that left 87 people dead. That fire led to U.S. Forest Service outreach and an aggressive goal of extinguishing the fires.
But it was not until the 1940s that the technological ability to effectively and mass fire extinguishing was introduced, and the resulting collapse of fire zones in the Western United States. The Smokey Bear era has begun.
An Oregon wildfire storyline below tells the story. There was a large decline in the area of wildfires around 1940. The collapse in these fires was not caused by climate change, but by human intervention.
Over the past few decades (70s to present) many fires have returned to the Northwest landscape but there is nothing like the wildfires before human intervention.
- Some of the increase in wildfires is due to a policy that allows certain fires to be burned (based on an understanding of the important ecological role of fire).
- Some of it is caused by humans igniting fires ever-increasing (from our electrical infrastructure, arson and random fires start).
- Some of this is due to the massive introduction of flammable invasive grasses from abroad into our region.
- Much of it is due to the great variability in our forests, with fire suppression and poor forest practices, resulting in unusually dense timber stands dotted with burning debris from the past. and so catastrophic that we can’t control them.
- Some may be related to the relatively small (1-2F) global warming that has affected our region.
I believe the evidence is that climate change today plays a small role in increasing the frequency of wildfires, while other factors are more important.
In any case… and the key message in this blog… is that wildfires are a natural element of Northwest ecology and meteorology and that that The 50-year period of extinguished wildfires and smoke are anomalies from the area’s natural state of affairs.
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