1. Oregon statistics
2. California statistics
3. Idaho statistics
4. Washington fire program glance

As the wildfire season has stretched into fall, Ian Turner and 30,000 other firefighters have continued the battle across the West.

“You stay heads-up, make sure you maintain situational awareness, and make sure you have a good safety zone,” the U.S. Bureau of Land Management Boise District engine captain said.

This was an unusual year for wildfires across the West, he said. The season started early and is continuing well into October, and the fires are bigger.

“We started responding at the end of May and it’s been steady since,” Turner said. “We have more intense fires and more time spent on those fires.”

Action heavy, extended

Wildfires have continued to break out, even after fall arrived.

“Burning conditions similar to August are seen into early to mid-October,” said Jim Wallmann, meteorologist at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise. The late season “has proven to be as busy as 2020,” another unusual year. Fall’s cooler conditions and lower sun angles aid firefighters, “but when the winds blow, the fires are burning like they are in mid-August.”

Nowhere has the fire season been more intense than in Oregon. The number of acres burned across the state is a record-setting 1.9 million and counting, state Department of Forestry public affairs officer Jessica Neujahr said. That’s nearly double the 1 million acres that burned in 2020 and the 1.2 million acres that burned in 2012.

This year, a fuel-drying early July heatwave was followed by severe storms that produced more than 4,000 lightning strikes in central, eastern and southwestern Oregon, she said. The state also had several human-caused fires, and “a lot of wind.”

The combination of more and bigger fires has stressed firefighting resources and reduced agencies’ initial-attack capability.

“We did get help from other states,” Neujahr said.

Programs tested

“One of the most critical factors this summer was the interagency relationships,” said Josh Harvey, Idaho Department of Lands Fire Management Bureau chief. “We went into fire season and Washington and Oregon were already into fire season.” Montana helped Idaho, “especially with aircraft.”

Washington in recent years has beefed up its fire program, including increasing the number of aircraft available for the state’s use when needed.

“In the last three years, even as we’ve seen an increasing number of fires and increasing geography, we’ve kept 95% of fires below 10 acres,” said Hilary Franz, Washington public lands commissioner. “This will be the fourth year we will be able to keep 95% below 10 acres.”

‘All hands on deck’

From Jan. 1 through Oct. 9, the U.S. has had 40,140 fires that burned 7.66 million acres, according to NIFC.

Last year, 46,561 fires burned just over 2.5 million acres. The annual averages for 2014-2023 are 47,515 fires and just over 6.2 million acres burned.

A few big, human-caused fires got Oregon’s record-breaking season off to an early start, and then lightning storms “started fires everywhere,” said Matt McElligott, a North Powder, Ore., rancher and Oregon Cattlemen’s Association president. “All hands were on deck.”

Central and eastern Oregon, where he ranches, were particularly snake-bitten. Starting in mid-July, dry conditions turned vegetation into an outsized tinder box.

“Some fire grew 10,000 acres in one day, so it was tough to get around it all,” McElligott said. With air and ground resources spread thin, “at times it seemed like farmers and ranchers were on their own” protecting private land.

As firefighters, engines and aircraft joined the battle, agencies and contractors “did a pretty good job of spreading them out,” McElligott said. “But they’ve never been challenged like this before.”

Wildfire’s huge impact on Oregon drew national attention, and “we were able to speed up the process of rebuilding” including through state and federal action, he said.

The Cattleman’s Association also spread the word that help was needed, and its wildfire relief fund as of Sept. 30 had collected just over $250,000, 10 times more than 2020’s record high, McElligott said. “That just shows the community that when times are bad, the good comes out in people.”

An unknown number of cattle were lost, he said.

Hot zone

This year’s heavy fire activity will have long-term consequences, Idaho Cattle Association executive vice president Cameron Mulrony said.

“It’s just going to put a lot of pressure on the resource that cattlemen need,” he said. “We’ve lived through fire before, but in that tight geographic area there is going to be a lot of cattlemen and cattle that need the same resource.”

In late August, 41% of the Boise National Forest was closed to public entry because of wildfire, public affairs officer Mike Williamson said.

For several weeks, four incident management teams operated on the forest fighting fires.

“The Boise is no stranger to large fires or hosting incident management teams, (but) nobody can remember having that many (teams) for that long,” Williamson said Oct. 1, when three teams remained.

Non-forested or lightly forested areas were most impacted by fires, with a few big exceptions, said Matt Reeves, a U.S. Forest Service research ecologist in Missoula, Mont. In much of the West, “it was super hot for a very long time, against a very large fuel bed.”

Sites of the 20 largest fires in Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington had a combined average fine-fuel load 60% above the long-term average, he said.

Huge swaths of dry, fire-ready grasses, shrubs and brush contributed to the problem.

In Oregon, 80% of fire activity occurred in those environments, Reeves said. Fire consumed 5% of the contiguous sagebrush, which is “big and unheard of” and raises the possibility that shallower-rooted annual cheatgrass will take its place.

“In many cases, these fires are selecting the high-cheatgrass areas,” he said. “Not all.”

Plenty of fuel

In California, a Pacific storm in August 2023 added a growing season for grasses and promoted layering, said David Acuna, Cal Fire battalion chief for communications. May and June 2024 were the hottest on record, drying the added growth.

“We started having fires in the north part of the state very early,” he said.

“We get the right conditions and we can burn three to four times what we did 20 to 30 years ago” on rangeland, said Mike Pellant, a retired rangeland ecologist who chairs the Ada County Soil and Water Conservation District in southwest Idaho.

This year illustrates that “big fire years are episodic,” he said. “A lot of this is cheatgrass driven.”

The nonnative weed, which can ignite easily and spread fire quickly, has “taken over in some areas,” Pellant said.

Higher likelihood of more frequent, large fires comes when the past year’s carryover combines with new growth accelerated by a wet spring. When all of the cheatgrass dries, it’s a wildfire waiting to happen. Just add lightning.

“That’s what happened this year,” which had “a lot of dry lightning,” Pellant said. While most fires are human-caused, dry lightning “can ignite multiple fires. It strains fire suppression capabilities and the ability to quickly extinguish fires.”

Sagebrush and bluebunch wheatgrass — well-spaced plants through which fire does not spread quickly — once stood in many southwest Idaho areas but were replaced by blanket-like cheatgrass.

“Now, with cheatgrass, once it ignites it’s just off to the races,” Pellant said. “With a strong wind, a fire can burn thousands of acres a day easily.”

Solutions include replacing cheatgrass with perennial plants and establishing more fuel breaks.

“We have tools, but we also have more land than we can apply those tools to,” Pellant said.

High heat

This year showed that “timing of heat matters a lot,” said Erica Fleishman, Oregon State University professor and director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute.

“Just having a normal or above-normal water year isn’t insurance against wildfires,” she said. “As the West becomes warmer, snow is melting earlier so things are tending to become drier somewhat earlier. We also are tending to have somewhat stronger early heatwaves. So there are some overall changes in climate patterns that are affecting wildfire risk.”

The number of burned acres can drop in any given year, but the overall long-term trend is for more acreage burned, Fleishman said.

Even in a busy year, “there can be a real discrepancy in perception,” she said. “If you said, ‘In western Oregon, was it a big fire year?’ many would say no. If you said to someone in Boise or eastern Oregon, ‘Was it a big fire year?’ the answer would be yes.”

“Some parts of the country typically would have a season-ending (weather) event by now, and they have not,” NIFC spokesman Stanton Florea said Sept. 27.

Highest preparedness

U.S. wildfire preparedness levels reflect the need for firefighting resources up to a high of PL-5.

“We didn’t go to PL-5 in 2022 or 2023,” said Carrie Bilbao, a fire center spokesperson. This year, PL-5 was in place on three separate occasions: July 18-Aug. 21, Sept. 6-19 and Oct. 8, which continued as of Oct. 14.

The number of people fighting fires peaked Aug. 3 at 30,666, she said.

And now, in mid-October, the battle continues for those firefighters, who attack the fires from the land and the air — and look for a break in the weather that will bring one of the West’s busiest fire seasons to a smoldering end.

“We’ve been working a lot of hours,” said Turner, the BLM engine captain.