After the FlamesComplexities of fire defy simple answers.

When you’re one of the top colleges of forestry in the world and nearly a million acres of your state are burning, with more than 4,000 homes destroyed, multiple lives lost and cities stopped in their tracks by toxic smoke, it stands to reason that people will turn to you with questions.

The OSU College of Forestry is ready for that, said Tom DeLuca, Cheryl Ramberg Ford and Allyn C. Ford Dean of the College of Forestry, but its answers aren’t simple and they come with a heavy dose of reality and historical perspective.

“We know we’re in a period of shifting climate and subsequent shifting of fire regimes, but the fires themselves are not unprecedented,” he said. Large fires west of the Cascades have tended to occur every 150 to 500 years and burn 100,000 to 1 million acres. What’s different now is that they occur in a warming, drying climate, on human-altered landscapes with more people and more of their property threatened.

“Now, with managed forests, and managed-then-not-managed forests, as well as all the human infrastructure that’s built into the forests, we have completely different fuel loading across the landscape than we did 150 years ago.

“But the forests will still burn. All forests burn. All biomass has the potential to burn and under the right conditions it will.”

The realities are that we have to learn to live with fire, just like people learned to live with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, but that doesn’t mean we have to roll over and play dead.

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DeLuca and his colleagues agree that while it’s understandable to want a simple solution to fire concerns, the fire equation is too complicated for one-size-fits-all answers. From ignition to suppression, the variables constantly shift.

“A couple of years back during another bad fire season, about 65% of the wildfires in Oregon were related to human activity — a cigarette in the backcountry, a downed power line, fireworks, you name it,” DeLuca said. “Humans have increased the ignitions. Normally, our firefighters have put out about 97% of the fire starts; the remaining 3% account for the large fires in the U.S.”

People must do what they can to build fire-resistant communities, say the college’s scientists. Public and private landowners must manage forests to make them less susceptible to giant conflagrations, and the methods must be tailored to widely varying fire regimes across the state. Reducing the amount and types of fuel is usually the goal, but techniques vary from intentional burning to letting some small wildfires burn, to having work crews remove woody debris. On range- and grasslands, the answer is often to return vegetation to more natural, fire-resistant patterns.

Doing that, noted Katy Kavanagh, the college’s associate dean for research, would show that modern Oregonians can learn from Indigenous Peoples, who routinely set fires to restart natural growth patterns and clear land to increase their food supply. (See the college’s work with tribal land managers.)

Since the wildfire outbreak in late summer, OSU fire experts have been all over national, state and local media outlets, and have advised many government officials. Sometimes that advice differs, colleague to colleague.

“Dueling experts is the definition of science,” Kavanagh said. “We test and refine our thinking. That is frustrating to politicians, I think, because they want an answer and there really isn’t one answer to a lot of these questions. It took centuries to create these conditions, and it will take decades of coordinated effort to address the challenges we face.”

Meanwhile, to help get the researchers’ most applicable solutions into use, the college is collaborating with OSU Extension’s expansion of its fire program, which it proactively launched before the Labor Day fires and includes hiring fire extension agents to work across Oregon.

Kavanagh noted that the Labor Day fires — which consumed entire towns as they raced down river drainages, pushed by unusual winds that roared out of the east — offered an important reminder that even doing everything right can’t always protect people and property from fires. She told of a couple of fellow scientists who lived in the woods and followed all the best science in making their property fire-resistant.

When one of the Labor Day fires came roaring toward them, “they had time to grab their laptops and go. The fires we just experienced were humbling. We are not in control when they’re racing like that. And that’s part of this lesson. The likelihood of controlling a fire event like we just experienced is very low.”

DeLuca said experts from the College of Forestry and other colleges at Oregon State remain eager to help managers tailor their land stewardship to particular topographies and fire regimes, to help communities become fire-adapted, and to integrate emerging research with traditional ecological knowledge.

“The realities are that we have to learn to live with fire, just like people learned to live with hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, but that doesn’t mean we have to roll over and play dead,” he said. “The fire management practices of Indigenous Peoples evolved in this region over 15,000 years.

“Whether people want to listen to the realities we can share is another matter, but there’s a lot that can be done.”

Useful Links:

• Extension Fire Program
• Northwest Fire Science Consortium
• Firewise USA
• OSUAA Beaver Lodge wildfire resources