JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
We start this hour in the tinder-dry northwest United States where tens of thousands of people have been evacuated from wildfires in recent weeks. The fires have also burned hundreds of homes and destroyed valuable cattle-grazing land. We have NPR’s Kirk Siegler on the line. He covers wildfires. Hi there.
KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: Hello.
SUMMERS: Kirk, can you just start by putting this fire season in context? How bad are things?
SIEGLER: Well, Juana, everyone was worried about this very thing going into the summer after years of extreme drought in the West – especially this past winter was record warm in a lot of states. And so here we are. It’s terribly smoky outside. It’s so hot, it’s so dry. For context, half of the out-of-control wildfires right now in the U.S. that are burning are right here in the northwest. Oregon is so far the worst. Roughly a third of all the acres burned in the U.S. total has been in that state. That’s a record. And today we’re tracking the top priority for firefighters are these two huge 100,000-acre-plus fires in Oregon and Washington.
There are also problems flaring up in Utah and down in Nevada. And I’ll say it’s not even mid-August. You know, consider that California has yet to see really major fires on the scale yet of what we’ve seen here in the northwest, like Spokane, Washington, where whole neighborhoods are just decimated.
SUMMERS: Yeah, just devastating. I know that you’ve been reporting on the ground there, Kirk. Are firefighters any closer to containing those blazes?
SIEGLER: Well, they are making good progress, including on the Old Trails fire. That’s the most destructive, and that’s the one suspected to be arson. Here’s Washington’s public lands commissioner Dave Upthegrove. He’s pleading with residents to be vigilant, do their part and follow burn bans.
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DAVE UPTHEGROVE: We’ve asked a lot of our firefighters this summer, and one thing every one of us can do for them is to help make sure they don’t have to fight another fire.
SUMMERS: And as he’s alluding to there, conditions are just super dangerous. There have already been several firefighter deaths this summer. How unusual is that at this point?
SIEGLER: Well, to your point, there have actually been 10 wildland firefighter deaths just this summer to date. That said, it’s hard to answer just how unusual it is because, you know, every year, every fire is different. The circumstances leading up to an accident are different. But I’ll tell you this is an increasingly dangerous job. Today in Utah, flags are flying at half-staff to honor two pilots that were killed in a chopper crash just this past Friday in a big fire. In June, one of the most high-profile accidents near the Utah-Colorado border – four firefighters ended up getting killed after jumping out of a chopper to fight a big remote fire that had overwhelmed them.
You know, it’s all leading to questions, Juana, about the safety of deploying these crews – and the decisions behind that right now – into places where fires, at least immediately, aren’t a threat to lives and property. I think there’s going to be a lot of studying after the fact.
SUMMERS: I mean, to your point there, the Trump administration said that federal fire agencies would aggressively try to stop every wildfire ignition. Does that approach risk putting more firefighters in harm’s way?
SIEGLER: Well, that’s a big question that I also think will get asked. But I will tell you that this aggressive firefighting strategy isn’t new, really, and it spans multiple administrations. You know, for more than a century now, the policy has really been to put out almost all wildfires. So now there’s this huge unnatural buildup of brush and trees, and you combine that with longer, hotter summers due to climate change. So this question gets asked every time we’re in a bad year like this. We’re just making the problem worse – you know, are we? – by not letting nature do its job regenerating the land. And there’s a lot more pressure on firefighters now as we speak today.
SUMMERS: NPR’s Kirk Siegler, thank you.
SIEGLER: You’re welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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