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Casey Kulla: We’re not helpless in the face of fire

Submitted photo##Wildflowers bloom in an area burned by the September 2020 fire that devastated the mountain community of Detroit.
Submitted photo##Wildflowers bloom in an area burned by the September 2020 fire that devastated the mountain community of Detroit.
##Casey Kulla
##Casey Kulla

Nine years ago this week, I was out in our fields crying as I harvested our vegetables.

I was singing the farewell song from Holden Village, the remote, wooded community where I spent my formative years, as it seemed destined to burn to the ground in the face of a wildfire. It goes, “Give us good courage, not knowing where we go; to know that your hand is leading us, wherever we might go.”

The Wolverine Creek Fire of 2015 started on July 29 with a lightning strike amid inaccessible cliffs in Washington’s Wenatchee National Forest. It burned toward the community’s only road, forcing residents to evacuate as a hotshot crew arrived to protect what it could of the buildings.

Fortunately, residents had spent the previous 20 years preparing, by maintaining a defensible space around homes, replacing cedar roofs with roofs of standing seam metal, and installing Big Gun sprinklers along the perimeter.

With those preparations, the amazing hotshot crew and a handful of operations staff who stayed behind to eat melting ice cream, run sprinklers and char ground between buildings and the oncoming fire, the town managed to survive. The fire burned around and past, then continued on up the valley to the Cascade crest.

From afar, we didn’t yet know how it had come out, but feared the worst — that this special place was gone, never to arise from the ashes and melted glass.

When the news arrived that they had saved the community, I cried anew for joy and relief. Then the dread set in again.

I assumed the fire killed everything for miles, and that it would never be the same again in our lifetimes. But in 2017, our family returned in the winter time and found it was not as devastated as we had imagined. The stark black of charred trees was disorienting, but the deep white snow softened the harsh edges.

“Well, it will be much harder in the bright light of summer,” I rationalized. But we’ve since returned every few years, and what I’ve been seeing continues to amaze me.

The valley burned, but it is not gone. It is just different.

Some of the oldest matriarch Ponderosa pines died, and local hikes are hotter with the reduced shade. However, the fire-killed trees are now snags full of new life.

With the fire came sun on soil and the undergrowth returned. Ponderosa seedlings seemed to spring from every little nook.

And the insects!

With flowers thriving in the understory came butterflies and bumblebees. Berries are thriving there as well, attracting birds and black bears.

Four years ago next week, after moving irrigation pipe all day to wet the edges of our farm, I was awakened from unsettled sleep by a 1 a.m. phone call. I rushed to the Yamhill County Emergency Management office to sign an emergency declaration.

The Labor Day wildfires of 2020, which ultimately burned more than 1 million acres in Oregon, had reached our county, torching parts of Cherry Grove and Chehalem Mountain. These fires burned homes, displaced residents and claimed nine lives around the state.

The disruptions caused by the fire burning from home to home are still with us: people displaced, schools missing students, churches and clubs missing families.

Wildfire is going to be with us. It has to be with us.

It isn’t just that the U.S. Forest Service and Oregon Department of Forestry were told to fully suppress wildfires for decades in places that need to burn to be healthy. And it isn’t just that in a hotter, drier world, we have to expect wildfire in the hills and in our neighborhoods.

Here in the Willamette Valley, ancestors of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians used fire to tend the land for first foods. But well before human-caused climate change and the decades of active suppression, our government forcibly removed indigenous people from land they had tended for thousands of years.

Fortunately, cultural fire is returning to the valley, thanks to the advocacy and persistence of tribal members and the support of local, state, and federal land managers. Check out this powerful video produced by CTSI, CTGR, and Luckiamute Watershed Council about reintroducing cultural fire to the Valley, found at: www.polkswcd.com/news--announcements/cultural-burning-rekindling-a-relationship-with-fire

The Yamhill Soil and Water Conservation is hard at work getting cultural fire back on the land here, too. Many of our landscapes need fire and people are bringing it back.

However, to keep our homes safe, we need to prepare like our community in the mountains did.

Making a home resistant to incoming fire doesn’t mean a sterile landscape. We have years of insurance company tests, research by the U.S. Forest Service’s Jack Cohen, and real-life experience in places like Colorado and California, to show us the way.

Start at the home and make sure roofs and gutters are clear of flammables. Install mesh on attic venting, and clear away flammables or shield them around the home perimeter.

For more details, visit the National Fire Protection Association website at: www.nfpa.org/education-and-research/wildfire/preparing-homes-for-wildfire.

We can prepare our homes; we can make them easier for our amazing fire crews to protect.

Finally, it is time to reverse years of underinvesting in our fire departments and districts. Property tax limitations have hampered efforts to build a modern fire protection system, but there’s still time to invest in the fire system we need for a hotter, drier world with more homes in the path of embers.

Here in Oregon, the State Fire Marshal’s Office began that reinvestment by covering the cost of seasonal “up-staffing” and providing fire engines for local rapid response. OSFM was granted one-time money for that work through 2021’s Senate Bill 762; we should insist legislators permanently fund that work.

Wildfire doesn’t have to be something we fear. We can take action. We can support cultural fire, prepare our homes, and invest in local response.

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