‘For a while, it looked like the whole world might burn’

DURKEE, Ore. — Bert Siddoway heard the fire before he saw it, no seconds at all between the flash of lightning and the boom of thunder. The strike “shook the whole flipping town,” he said, and immediately ignited a wildfire in a hard-to-reach spot in the hills above the community where he is both a rancher and captain of the rural volunteer fire department.

On July 20, three days after it started, the Durkee Fire was 15 miles wide and moving at 30 mph, and was, for a time, the largest wildfire in the nation. Fueled by dry grasslands, the fire jumped over Interstate 84 near the Oregon-Idaho border, closing the road to traffic for several days and cloaking the region in smoke. Last month, pine trees reduced to snags continued to puff smoke from embers smoldering deep within. The once-tawny hills, scattered with sagebrush and pines, were charred black as far as the eye could see.

“By the first of August when fire season is supposed to start, we were burned out,” Siddoway said, on a tour of the fire damage. “For a while, it looked like the whole world might burn.”

As the Durkee Fire burned in Eastern Oregon, other major fires blazed at the same time across Oregon and Washington, straining both national and state resources. Fire crews were so strapped nationally that firefighters from Virginia with little experience with range wildfires were the only personnel available. When the fire season began to ebb at the end of September, 1.9 million acres in Oregon had burned — a state record.

As summers grow hotter, Oregon and other states will have to dedicate more resources to fighting wildfires that have become more frequent and intense. Oregon must also figure out how to help ranchers and grasslands recover. Wildfires in grassland or shrubland made up about 60% of the acres burned in the state’s record-breaking summer, a troubling development in the state’s fire patterns as intense heat waves driven by climate change collided with invasive, combustible grasses and longer fire seasons.

“The 2024 fire season highlights the reality that’s before us: The wildfire season is getting longer with larger fires burning for more time,” said Kassie Keller, a spokesperson for the Oregon State Fire Marshal. “This is not news to the fire service, but this season did help make more people aware of our new fire reality.”

The average acreage that burns each year statewide has doubled every decade since the 1990s, said Oregon state Sen. Jeff Golden, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Interim Committee on Natural Resources and Wildfire, and who represents a southern Oregon district hard hit by fire in 2020. There, the Alameda Fire destroyed 2,600 homes and killed three people, a tragedy that, along with catastrophic wildfires in other, wetter forests that used to see fewer fires, spurred changes in the state’s wildfire policy.

“It’s just a very steady upward curve,” Golden said. “And what was distinctive about this year was the overwhelming majority of those acres were in Eastern Oregon, the far east. We haven’t seen that before.”

Because Eastern Oregon is sparsely populated, fewer structures were affected. Nonetheless, the grassland wildfires are expected to prove devastating to ranchers, who had to scramble to move cattle and protect their homes and other property. In Baker County, roughly three times the size of Rhode Island and the epicenter of the Durkee Fire, cattle outnumber people 75,376 to 17,000.

This year, the state found itself at its highest alert levels for a longer amount of time than prior years, Joy Krawczyk, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Forestry, wrote in an email.

“There are only a finite number of firefighting resources and competing demands throughout the state and nationally,” Krawczyk said, “so we focused on doing the best we could with whatever we had available to protect Oregonians.”

Fighting wildfires

Most states, including Oregon, have cooperative agreements with federal agencies to fight wildfires. The states generally pay for the cost of fire suppression and then are reimbursed by the federal government. States have multiple, complex ways of paying for fire suppression and programs that harden communities against the effects of wildfire.

Many states use money from their general funds, a budgeting practice that can put states under fiscal strain, according to a 2022 report by The Pew Charitable Trusts. Estimates used to craft wildfire budgets often prove insufficient, which means states have to cover spending gaps with supplemental appropriations and other after-the-fact measures. While those measures “provide needed flexibility during emergencies, they also obscure from the state budgeting process the true costs of wildfires,” the report found.

In Oregon, current funding mechanisms are inadequate to address the growing complexity and cost of wildfires, Krawczyk said, and the need for a “sustainable and equitable funding structure” for wildfire response and mitigation “has never been more urgent.” So far in 2024, the state has spent nearly $250 million on wildfires, according to the Oregon Capital Chronicle, or about 2.5 times the money budgeted for wildfire response. State lawmakers are expected to address additional funding mechanisms in 2025.

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“It took 2020 to get us to make the investment in the big wildfire bill in 2021,” Golden said of the devastating 2020 fire season that displaced so many of his constituents. “And the sight of communities burning down, people dying, people’s lives being ruined, people being unable to get insurance again, all of that. But that’s a pretty high price to pay to get some legislation passed.

“I think we’re running the risk of very deep regret as we look at the ashes of future fires,” he added.

Golden would like to see a return of the severance tax on timber harvests to pay for prevention programs and wildfire response, rather than a reliance on the state’s general fund. Many large tracts of timber are owned by real estate investment trusts, Golden said, which means they don’t pay corporate income taxes in the state. A revived severance tax on timber harvests could be a dedicated source of money to address wildfires, Golden said, but it faces significant opposition from the timber industry. It’s also a nonstarter among his Republican colleagues, who last month called on state agencies to reconsider their forest management approaches first.

“Lives, property, and livestock are lost when fires ravage our state,” state Rep. Jeff Helfrich, the House Republican leader, said in a statement. “This is the direct consequence of bad policy.” Helfrich called on his colleagues to relax restrictions on the timber industry that, he said, prevent it from “clearing out deadwood and decreasing the severity of fires.”

Major changes expected

Meanwhile, the scars from the 294,265-acre Durkee Fire will remain visible on the hills for the next 40 years, Siddoway said. And in the short term, the state’s ranchers will have to find new grazing land for cattle. The state’s congressional delegation and the governor have asked the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to adjust grazing permits. Ranchers will need to repair burned fences as well as rebuild water structures, replace outbuildings and manage downed trees. Some grassland may need reseeding, putting thousands of acres of range off limits to grazing for several years while soil and grasses recover.

The ranching industry is likely to see major changes in Oregon because of the wildfires, in part because so many acres of rangeland burned, said Matt McElligott, president of the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association. It could take several years to recover, and in the meantime, ranchers will need to find somewhere for displaced cattle. At $676 million annually, cattle are the second-most valuable agricultural commodity by gross dollar sales in the state of Oregon behind only nursery products, McElligott said.

Hay prices have already risen, Siddoway said. Moving cattle to new rangeland is pricey, too. And Siddoway points out that he couldn’t get insurance on his cows this summer, despite having the same agent and type of policy in place for the past 15 years.

Officials don’t know yet how many cows and calves were lost in the blaze — that may not be certain until November or December when Oregon ranchers round up their cattle, which range on a mixture of federal, state and private grazing land from April into the late fall.

“Everybody will need new pasture next year,” Siddoway said. “All of the economic issues are magnified.”

McElligott said he wasn’t sure if the true scope of loss will ever be known.

“I don’t know if we’ll get a real tally on what’s lost. Some of these people did the best they could to save their animals and property and belongings. Just in a matter of hours, everything you’ve worked for — as a rancher, it’s a lifelong job — could be gone,” he said.

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