By Hilary Franz
For the last month, the world’s attention has been on the catastrophic wildfires burning in Los Angeles. These fires caught everyone’s attention with the severity of the destruction and loss, in the middle of winter, in one of the most populated cities in the nation. The LA fires involve tens of thousands of acres, tiny in comparison to acres burned in Washington state, but massive in the level of loss to life and property.
Just a few months before, wildfires burned in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts and last summer, much of the western half of North America was on fire. Oregon had almost two million acres burn. California was grappling with the Park Fire, the fourth largest in the state’s history. New Mexico was dealing with flash floods exacerbated by the South Fork and Salt Fires. Canada was dealing with the town of Jasper burning to the ground. And for Texas, wildfires became a new threat. In one month alone, in North America there were 85 large wildfires requiring active management, with roughly 30,000 wildland firefighters and support staff deployed.
Fires are a natural phenomenon, since the beginning of time -- what isn’t natural is the increase in extreme wildfires like we tragically witnessed in LA or like the entire west coast experienced during Labor Day Firestorm 2020. Year after year faced with extreme heat, drought, drying and dying forests and landscapes, catastrophic wildfires are growing in size, severity, and scope.
By now, after the last decade of disastrous fires in every corner of the globe, we know that a hands-off, wildland-firefighting-as-usual approach will not work.
Our experience in Washington state presents an important lesson and a path forward.
For the last eight years, I have served as the 16th Wildfire Chief and Commissioner of Public Lands for Washington State. During this time, I have witnessed firsthand the increasing threat of extreme wildfires throughout every corner of our state. In my office, I have a 1963 Christmas card from my predecessor, Burt Cole who served as Commissioner of Public Lands for 24 years from 1957 to 1981. In his 1963 card, he laments the devastating horrific wildfires that ravaged Washington state, burning 660 acres. That’s right--660 acres.
Just over 50 years later, in 2015 more than one million acres burned-- a 1500% increase. And like many states, Washington was caught completely by surprise. We were ill-prepared and ill-equipped to fight these catastrophic wildfires. Since then, every year -- but one -- has been a non-stop, full court press challenging and exhausting wildfire season.
In 2015, we had no money appropriated annually for wildfire protection, and we had 40 full-time wildland firefighters and just nine Vietnam War veteran Huey helicopters. In 2017, after back-to-back three years in a row of bad fire seasons, we began prepositioning air resources in areas most prone to wildfires, and we implemented initial attack so that the moment smoke was spotted in the air, our air resources were up flying and putting out the fire. With limited resources, limited funding, and limited time, our best chance against these wildfires was preventing them from getting too big, too quickly.
But nine old helicopters do not go very far when you have a large state with very dry, heavily vegetated landscape, thousands of sparks, and extremely high winds.
Too often it takes a tragedy to create meaningful change, and break from an outdated system and approach. Labor Day 2020 Firestorm was that tragedy for us. On Labor Day 2020, within 36 hours, 80 fires sparked across central and eastern Washington burning over 500,000 acres, razing the small town of Malden to the ground, and taking the life of a one-year-old boy – his parents badly burned – while trying to outrun the flames of fast-moving Cold Springs Canyon Fire.
I remember walking through the town of Malden with the mayor just 24 hours after eighty percent of the town burned down. Together, we cried, as we took in the devastation -- the fire station reduced to ashes, the windows of city hall now reduced to puddles of glass, the tricycle leaning against the foundation of a home burned to the ground.
That year, our state’s wildfire resources would be stretched to the limit. As we begged for resources at the national level, we were repeatedly told “we didn’t have enough values at risk”.
Oregon and California were facing the same catastrophic wildfire conditions, but their fires were closer to more densely populated areas. “Values at risk” is a terrible euphemism for lives, homes, communities at risk.
Labor Day 2020 firestorm changed everything. For me. For the state of Washington.
I realized then that we needed to take responsibility for our own fate and not rely on others to rescue us. So, starting in 2021, we took control of our destiny. We more than tripled the aviation resources we had, and we moved our contracts for aerial resources from “call-when-needed” to “exclusive use”. We based initial attack air resources at regional airports in fire-prone areas, allowing us to be on a fire within 15 to 30 minutes in most cases. Exclusive use contracts gave us the ability to determine when, how and where we deploy resources, and effectively employ a strategy to have enough air resources available for initial attack while also having enough air resources on large significant fires.
As the number and geography of extreme wildfires has grown in Washington, the number of aviation resources we utilize has too. In 2023 we had a total of 40 aviation assets, and last year, we had the most ever with 44.
And the strategy is working. Over these past four years, while we’ve seen increasing number and geography of extreme wildfires in Washington, we’ve seen the lowest total acres burned on our lands in the past decade. Since 2020, we have had less than 300,000 acres burn annually -- down to the numbers we had in early 2000s, and we have kept 95% of our fires below ten acres for four years in a row.
At a time when temperatures are rising and the climate crisis is literally fanning the flames of wildfires across the country, Washington has flipped the script. In Oregon this year, almost two million acres burned--a historically difficult summer for our southern neighbors. While in Washington, we had roughly the same conditions and same number of wildfire starts, yet we were able to contain fires to 300,000 acres. This is during a record year for wildfires across the country and an unprecedented number of days spent at PL-5.
While federal agencies were struggling to meet the needs of states across the country, because we had exclusive use agreements in place, Washington was able to take care of itself while also sharing its contracted single and multi-engine amphibious scoopers and large airtankers, with neighboring states and nations needing aviation support, including Alaska, British Columbia, Texas, Montana, and California. For example, just last March, we were able to send five of our contracted large air tankers to Texas to help respond to the devastating Smokehouse Creek Fire – the single largest response of airtankers in the country at a moment when many aircraft were still in seasonal maintenance.
We have also made significant investments with our ground resources. After two years of lobbying and coalition building--bringing together firefighters, Tribes, forestland owners, conservation, utilities, insurance, local government, and public health organizations--we passed unanimously a historic $500 million investment in wildfire response, forest restoration and community resilience.
Our exclusive use aviation contracts along with investments in new technologies, ground resources and support has enabled us to modernize and expand our wildfire response team, accelerate our initial attack, and have enough resources for sustained attack all season long.
The last four years, our strategy has been tested, from repeated state-wide droughts, increasing fire starts, and a forest health crisis that has moved from our eastern Washington Ponderosa Pines to our mixed conifer western Washington forests. These conditions are still giving our firefighters, emergency responders and all the team that supports them little time for rest. While we are not out of the woods on extreme wildfires, we have developed and implemented an effective wildfire strategy of initial attack, pre-positioning air resources, addressing inefficiencies in the system, accelerating deployment of aviation resources, utilizing exclusive use contracts, and rapidly increasing the number of ground and air resources.
This last year should be the wakeup call for everyone, globally. Wildfires burning in the winter in LA and Brooklyn reveal that no one and nowhere is immune from the possibility of wildfire – they burn wherever fuel is, without regard to land use, resources, jurisdiction, or politics.
It is time to stop wishing that your community or your state is immune from wildfires. That it won’t happen here. Wildfires have arrived without our permission and they are not going away.
While this can make wildfire more frightening, it should also make it more unifying - together, all of us share the burden and the responsibility of protecting our lands, communities and first responders from these catastrophic wildfires.
In Washington, we have built a foundation for success, and we are proving it. We have developed an effective and proven approach to responding to these wildfires, reducing their destruction, and protecting our lands, communities, and firefighters. But we still have a long way to go to keep our lands and communities safe from catastrophic wildfires. We must keep investing in the people, the tools, the resources, and the technologies to respond to wildfires, restore our forests and rangelands, and make our communities more resilient.
And most of all, we must move at the pace and scale of wildfire.
Hilary Franz served as the Washington state Wildfire Chief and Commissioner of Public Lands from January 2017 to January 2025.
