Snowpack has mostly vanished from mid-elevation forests in Central Oregon, meaning logs, trees and shrubs are drying out earlier — one factor that could result in a boisterous wildfire season.
That was part of the report from a preseason wildfire briefing held Monday morning at the Sisters-Camp Sherman Fire District station in Sisters. Elected officials from Bend, Redmond and Sisters, along with state and local fire officials from departments in Redmond and the Sisters area, met at a roundtable hosted by U.S. Rep. Janelle Bynum (D-OR). They discussed planning efforts, the potential for funding to bolster preparedness, and response and the outlook for the season ahead.
Historically low snowpack doesn’t necessarily mean the region is in for a bad fire year, said Scott Brewer, a fire fuels specialist with the U.S. Forest Service and the Central Oregon Fire Management Service. But he compared snowpack to a battery of moisture to dampen fire activity throughout the summer — and Central Oregon’s is all but depleted.
“Right now, we’re seeing the data that’s telling us, yeah, we’re probably a little bit earlier,” Brewer said. “Yesterday we saw the fire that told us, yep, we should probably be ready.”
On Sunday afternoon, the day before the meeting, a wildfire sparked 3 miles southwest of Sisters and grew to more than 40 acres as temperatures approached 80 degrees. Crews have built a fire line around 60% of the blaze, according to the most recent update.
For the Oregon Department of Forestry and other agencies, some fire restrictions went into effect May 1, about six weeks earlier than normal, said Rob Pentzer, Central Oregon District Forester, during the meeting.
“We had four fires last week. That’s just not normal for us,” Pentzer said. “We’re expecting a busy year.”
Three of the five snow-measuring sites in Central Oregon, which lie between 4,000 and 6,000 feet elevation, have no snow as of this week, measuring at 0% of the median year’s snowpack, according to Brewer.
Despite the mild winter and slim snowpack, fire activity will depend on weather throughout the season, Brewer said.
“There’s so many variables throughout the season,” Brewer said. “We know what conditions are today, but as things increase, or decrease — if we get rain, we might not have fire. If things stay status quo, fire might just get worse.”
According to his analysis, previous years with similar snowpack have produced mixed wildfire results in Central Oregon. In 2015, for example, snowpack was near-record-low levels, but only 23,813 acres burned in the region, which stretches from east of the Cascades across the Ochoco Mountains and north to the Columbia River. However, wildfire devastated the rest of the state that year, burning two-thirds of a million acres, destroying more than 600 homes and structures.
In 2018 there were similar moisture levels to this year, and more than 350,000 acres burned in Central Oregon alone.
And climate forecasts may not bode well for that hope that summer rains will dampen wildfire. After a cool, wet spell in April, forecasters predict a 60% chance El Niño conditions will emerge between May and July, bringing warmer and drier weather than normal.
Ramping up preparedness
Officials with the Central Oregon Fire Management Service said the agency has hired more staff and is ready to take on this year’s fire season. It’s part of the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, which combined federal firefighting agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management under the Trump Administration.
One upside of the low snowpack is it’s allowed agencies to access terrain for prescribed burns earlier, said Shawn Jaca, fire staff with the Central Oregon Fire Management Service. The managed burns are a tool to make wildfires less destructive by pre-burning overgrown vegetation on fire-adapted landscapes overgrown from decades of suppression. Jaca said agencies have burned 25,000 acres in the region this season.
“That’s just scratching the surface,” James Osborne, unit chief with the regional fire service, said of this year’s treatments. He told Bynum about the need for more funding for prescribed burning, adding that prescribed burning activities need to be mindful of smoke in nearby communities.
“It’s a full-fledged combined effort, but the dollars only go so far,” he said. “We need to be able to ramp that up to get to those levels when fires were small on the landscape.”
Local fire departments are also hoping federal funding will bolster response and preparedness efforts. Bynum’s most recent funding requests from Congress include $2.4 million for Redmond Fire & Rescue to replace an aerial fire truck and $309,000 for the Sisters-Camp Sherman Fire District to purchase equipment and fund a program to help people remove vegetation around their homes.
“I’m trying to encourage them to ask for more,” Bynum told the Source, speaking of the fire agencies. “Tell me everything you need. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.”
Meanwhile, local governments in Central Oregon are adopting new codes aimed at making homes prepared to withstand wildfire. New homes in Bend, Sisters and Deschutes County must be built to “home hardening” standards using fire-resistant materials. Sisters was the first city in Central Oregon to adopt a defensible space code, creating mandatory vegetation buffers for new development.
“We’re really excited to be at the forefront, as a small city, protecting our community from wildfire,” Sisters Mayor Jennifer Letz said in a press conference following Monday’s roundtable. “We’re in a wildfire-dependent ecosystem, but keeping wildfires out of our cities, we’re going to do everything we can.”
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