Whole new ballgame: Fighting Oregon fires in the era of climate change

From KLCC Studios, this is Oregon on the Record.

I'm Michael Dunn. Fighting wildland fires in Oregon has never been easy. The vast wilderness and rangeland and incredibly different elevations and topographies has always made it tough. But at least in previous decades, it was predictable. Summer heat and dry vegetation coupled with lightning strikes and sometimes careless humans meant a few months of active firefighting. But now, fire is a 12-month phenomenon fueled by a warming climate and drier and drier fuels. We hardly have wildfires anymore. We have wildfire complexes that become massive at an almost impossible to believe rate of speed. Today on the show, you'll hear from one of the key figures in Oregon's firefighting structure and learn how they've had to develop and deploy new strategies to keep up with Oregon's new normal of almost constant fire. That's next on Oregon on the Record. If you're sick of hearing about wildfires and sick of breathing unhealthy air, just think about how the people who have to fight them feel right about this time every summer. And the job is getting more and more difficult and more and more dangerous. Right now, you'll hear from one of Oregon Department of Forestry's firefighting leaders and hear about how the game has changed. Kyle Williams, he's the Deputy Director for Fire Operations at the Oregon Department of Forestry. Mr. Williams, thank you so much for coming on and talking with us. Yeah, you bet. Really appreciate the invite. Yeah, maybe start with this. Kind of give the audience an overview of how we've traditionally fought wildfires in our state, you know, maybe 10, 20 years ago, because I do want to get into the differences that we're seeing now. But what was kind of the traditional way to attack a wildfire?

Well, so it all starts at the local level and our agency, the department of forestry is spread out. We protect about 16.2 million acres around the state. And that's a little bit of, I think the first piece of grounding that,

that,

You know people could use is that there's multiple agencies across the state that are responsible for wildland fire. And it starts where you would think right the forest service they've got about 16 million ish acres that of forest land that they manage and and protect and then. We protect primarily private land throughout the state. The chunk of state owned land is actually relatively small in our portfolio, but largely, you know, private land, the timberland and then folks in their backyards, that kind of stuff. And then you've got your local fire service as well that partners with what we would term those initial attack fires, which are the small ones and the ones that,

you know,

that's what we're built to go get quickly. Okay. So at that local level, you'd get, you know, the phone call, hey, there's a fire out on such and such road, and we'd send our local resources, a couple engines, maybe a helicopter, and a couple of our partners would show up and you'd largely be successful. Our key performance measure as an agency is a target of putting out 98% of wildfires that occur on our jurisdiction at 10 acres or less. So that really speaks to a model built around rapid