( Fire Management Officer, Cle Elum Ranger District, Mike Starkovich): As I hiked up there, I'd hope that we don't get one here
this year, well nature goes where it wants.
The day Jolly Mountain fire started there was a chance of lightning predicted.
Conditions were really dry despite the good winter we had from last year, there were sections
of the forest up there that had at least 50% standing dead timber in it which is a pretty
big safety concern for ground firefighters.
So when the fire started, conditions were right for a fire if it got started to have
some pretty good opportunity to grow and it did.
(Gary Berndt): I moved to Kittitas County in about 1973.
Cle Elum and Roslyn were sleepy little towns of 2,000 and 1,000 people.
Basically it was a logging community, railroad community, the mines had closed and there
weren't a lot of jobs.
There was no growth and no economic opportunity in Upper Kittitas County.
When the state started to grow in population and the economics in the west side people
began to come over here to recreate.
Kittitas County is about 70% public land or quasi-public and it is a great playground
with four seasons.
Folks tend to migrate, first into second homes and then into permanent residences, so what
is not realized is that this is a fire environment.
It historically has had fires since time and memorium.
(Mike Starkovich): Everywhere in the west, fire had an ecological role it played.
In the Teanaway valley for example, we had photographic evidence of from the early part
of the 20th century that showed the fire scars, showed the fires that occurred up to that
point.
I think that was from the mid 1930's so you could see very strong evidence of wildfire
occurrence.
Over the last hundred years, the combination of a lot of industrial
forest land ownership in the area because of the high productivity of the forest combined
with 100 years of fire suppression, aggressive fire suppression, we found that many of these
pine stands are overstocked.
I don't think fire suppression is bad but the result of putting every fire out has set
up conditions where we have an overstock, which in real terms means an over crowded
stand.
In the last five years, there have been a number of wildfires.
The first one that probably everyone remembers well is the Taylor Bridge fire that was in
2012.
It was followed that same season by the Table Mountain Fire which was a huge fire north
of Ellensburg, north of the valley.
The following year was another fire on the eastern edge of the county, the Colockum Tarps
Fire that came down from Chelan County.
I think the year after that was the Snag Canyon Fire as another lighting strike on the north
side of the valley and so we've had a pretty continuous streak of wildfires for the last
few years.
Now we have a lot of people on the landscape that weren't naturally here, you know, over
a hundred years ago, so we need to get people used to thinking about how do they fit in
with the ecology of the area and that ecology would have included fires so people need to
be thinking on how am I adapted on my property for a fire coming thru and making that defensible
where firefighters can safely help the landowners out when there is a fire cause there will
be fires in this area.
You can't always expect to have a fire engine in your yard during a major fire.
You cannot do that.
There aren't enough and it's a matter of managing the risk.
We have to prioritize where we can protect and what we can protect with the resources
we have.
We have to make a tough choice about where we can actually be successful and walk away
from the places we can't.
When people say wildland, people think, you know they really think wild and not a lot
of or any home sites.
You know, it's the places that you go to hike or place that you go to camp and it is a long
ways out of town and it's really not.
The Wildland Urban Interface here in Northern Kittitas County includes all the communities
that are here.We are standing in it right now and you know we are in Cle Elum.
(WFFA Kittitas Chapter President, Phil Hess): The forest is in a continual state of change.
It may look like its not changing from day to day or even from year to year, but it is changing.
The vegetation is changing, you know the shrub and herbaceous layer is changing and the trees
are growing and they're adding diameter and adding height so its a continual state of
change so what we try to tell them [small forest landowners] with a forest stewardship
plan is that they need to keep track of that change and influence that change in order
to create and maintain a healthy forest.
Washington State University Extension Forestry [http://forestry.wsu.edu/] has a program called
"Coached Stewardship Planning", the DNR [Washington State Department of Natural Resources] has
a program where they will cost-share a Forest Stewardship Plan [https://www.dnr.wa.gov/sflo]
So the Forest Stewardship Plan is kinda their handbook for taking care of their property.
We need all the help we can get from the landowners to have previously mitigated fuels to make
it easier and less work for the firefighters and they can deal with the flames and not
dealing with the extra fuel that's out on the landscape.
We work with Homeowner's Associations to raise their level of their awareness and become
a Fire Adapted Community [http://www.fireadaptedwashington.org/].
They recognize the need for access, for initial response crews, they need to learn that they
need to manage their vegetation, so that in the event of fire that the fire is not a high
intensity fire but it's a low intensity fire.
Then it becomes easier for the first responders to deal with it, either to manage it or put
it out.
So at the Conservation District, we primarily work with private landowners so any private
landowner in the County can contact us.
We have technical resources, we have staff that know about firewise and fuels reduction
techniques.
We search out grant funding sources for the landowners so we can help them with some of
the costs of doing these projects.
It's really our job to work with those private landowners on any of their resource
concerns and here its really about forest health and fuels reduction and firewise principles.
The one thing that Washington State, East slopes of the Cascades can predict annually
is a wildfire.
We don't know where, we don't know when but we know there will be one.
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