You’re not imagining it: there’s been more smoke in the air this year. Where once locals would joke about swapping the name for “summer” with “smoke season,” that unwelcome season appears now to include spring.
As Jennifer Baires’ May 23 feature story, “Treating the Forest,” outlined, a pilot project happening around Bend is allowing for more aggressive prescribed burning closer to our neighborhoods than ever before — and it’s backed by a boatload of federal funding. More money to avoid seeing Bend burn seems to come in all the time. With our growing population and a continuing press of homes into the forests of the west side, the threats to life and property are very real. Prescribed burns and clearing our homes of debris and burnable materials are the only real pieces of insurance we have against becoming another Paradise, California.
If that sounds akin to someone telling a kid to eat their vegetables because they’re good for them, it’s because it is.
No one likes to plan an active commute to work, only to finish that active commute with a coughing fit. It’s a pain to shut your windows, turn on the air filters, button up the building envelope against the onslaught.
Smoke exposure is a very real threat to people’s health here in Deschutes County. As Baires’ story shared, eastern Oregon has seen a 24.2-fold increase in days impacted by Air Quality Index values at or above “unhealthy” for sensitive groups. Checking the air quality each evening — when the effects tend to get worse in the depression that is Bend — to find yet another “unhealthy” rating is a great way to question why all of this is happening.
Yet there’s one thing worse than all of that: A raging wildfire, spun out of control, dumping toxic smoke on us and the rest of the state, too. Or, of course, burning the whole town.
A quote in Baires’ story from Amber Ortega, a regional smoke coordinator and air resource advisor for the U.S. Forest Service, sums it up quite well:
“Do we consent to the risk of a little bit of smoke for a night or so in order to create kind of a fuel break so that if wildfire is running into town, there’s a place where firefighters can anchor and slow it down and scare that fire away from town?… Or do we as a community prefer, like, no smoke, and, you know, we’ll take our chances.”
This spring, crews have been at work on prescribed burns of several hundred acres at a time — an approach that targets areas where threats to life and property are most acute, like just outside Bend, or the Metolius Basin near Sisters. But with 400,000 acres of forest needing treatment in the Deschutes National Forest alone, the plain fact is that we as Oregonians are far behind where we should be in terms of fire management. Too many years of avoiding all fire has led us to this point — and it’s only through fire will we turn that around.
So it’s smoke now or smoke later. . . and hopefully not both.
This article appears in Source Weekly May 30, 2024.
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Our forests have been horribly mismanaged for decades. Clear cuts. Fire suppression. So, of course we have a massive over-correct happening. Of course we do. The weather finally turns decent and we head outside. Smoke. This will last until it’s no longer safe for managed burns (something nature once tried to do but we wouldn’t let her). Right after the managed fires end, the wildfires will begin.
Bend is building MASSIVE developments on the Westside, the area of town that is most vulnerable to a tragic event just waiting to happen.
So, they will be burning everything on the perimeter West of town forever. Get used to it. Once again, we pay for the stupidity of city/county/state managers.
I was wondering if there’s a breakdown available of where this “boatload of federal funding” is docking and unloading? I can’t seem to find that information.
I have some questions. How often are they going to conduct prescribed burns in the same locations? What exactly is the prescribed burn season going to be; beginning and end date? Are we going to have to deal with smoke in the Spring and the Summer? I guess time will tell on that but my most important question is what is the overall health effect going to be in living in Bend? Lung Cancer, respiratory infections and asthma are real concerns. If you can’t even enjoy being in the outdoors peacefully, what’s the point.
And Dragon’s comment is very valid. Stop building housing. We don’t need more housing, people can move else where that want to move to Bend. I always hear our city saying, we need more housing. No you need affordable housing and to deal with the inventory you have. Stop the STR permitting. This city doesn’t need to grow anymore, we don’t have the proper infrastructure to support this growth.