Could a disaster like January’s wildfires happen here in Seattle? by Hannah Murphy Winter On January 1, 2025, a fire sparked outside of Los Angeles, near the Temescal Ridge Trail. It was a minor fire, only burning eight acres of w ilderness. Most of us in Seattle didn’t hear about that one. Then six days later, the Pacific Palisades fire started tearing through the LA hills. The same day, about 30 miles away, the Eaton Fire ignited. From 1,100 miles north, Seattleites watched for more than three weeks as 14 wildfires teetered on the edge of a city, consuming 57,000 acres and killing at least 29 people. The Eaton and Palisades fires alone burned an area that would cover 70 percent of Seattle. Standing in the Pacific Northwest, we could look at the LA fires in two ways: the first is as a disaster that happened in a dry, hot, drought-stricken climate, drastically different from the mossy, pine-y landscape on our horizon. Alternatively, though, we could see them as fires that consumed suburbs built into fire-prone foothills, not dissimilar from our own. So which one is right? Could a disaster like January’s wildfires happen here in Seattle? I took the question to Crystal Raymond, the deputy director of policy and management at the University of Washington’s Western Fire and Forest Resilience Collaborative. And you might’ve guessed by now that I didn’t get the clear-cut “no” that I’d hoped for. “Of course, the answer is yes and no,” she told me over the phone. To start, it helps to understand what led to the Los Angeles fires. At its core, it wasn’t tied to the climate crisis so much as it was a confluence of really bad luck. “You have three ingredients for these major fires,” explains Raymond. You need an ignition source (usually humans), fuel (dry brush, trees, etc.), and for large, fast-moving fires like these, you need winds that, rather than coming from the cool, wet ocean, come from the east—like California’s Santa Ana winds. Ignition can happen anywhere. It can occur naturally, but more often, it’s manmade—a cigarette butt, a campfire, a Cybertruck. King County’s Office of Emergency Management usually prepares for more ignition events starting after the Fourth of July; explosives make for excellent ignition events. The “fuel” part of the equation can be affected by climate change. California’s rainy season came in late last year, leaving its iconic Chaparral shrubland—which is already small, dry fuel that thrives in fire country—especially dry. When it comes to fires, fuel is quite possibly the greatest differentiator between Southern California and Western Washington. Where California has shrubs, we have thick, wooden trunks. Raymond recommends imagining a campfire. “Think about when someone throws a handful of dry grass or a dry shrub on their campfire. That’s going to burn like that,” she says, snapping. “Now imagine you have a big, sort of dry log, and you put that on your campfire. Maybe if it’s really dry, that’s gonna catch. But typically, when you put a big, sort of dry log on the fire, it doesn’t.” And then there’s the wind. In California, the Santa Ana winds are a part of the region’s identity. The wind events can happen dozens of times a year. Joan Didion wrote three haunting essays about them; the New York Times once said that “a dry, hot Santa Ana often symbolizes an unnamable menace lying just beneath the sun-shot surface of California life.” We have no such thing. In Seattle, most of our winds come from the west—full of cold, damp sea air that cools our climate down. “It’s what creates our coastal environment,” says Raymond. And when the winds do come from inland, they’re simply called “east winds” or “downslope winds,” she says, “because they come down from the Cascades and out towards the ocean.” Portland blanketed in smoke from the 2020 Labor Day Fires. hapabapa/GettyImages Forest Service researchers have been connecting our east winds to fire risk since the 1950s. “There is a close relation between…severe easterly winds and large forest fires in northwest Oregon and southwest Washington,” Owen P. Cramer wrote from the Pacific Northwest Research Station in 1957. “With the east winds comes the dreaded combination of low humidity and high wind that in the past has whipped small fires into conflagrations such as the Tillamook fire of 1933 and the fire that burned Bandon in 1936.” (The Tillamook burned more than 300,000 acres of wildland before seasonal rains took it out; the Bandon caused almost 2,000 people to evacuate.) When our east winds come around, they can create the same fast-moving fires that we saw in California. “They’re often very high wind speeds,” she says. “And they’re bringing hot, dry air from the interior of the continent to the west side. And so that’s what makes them particularly concerning for fire. We don’t get them as regularly and as often as they do in California, like the Santa Ana winds. And so that’s probably why they don’t have such a catchy phrase.” So, to go back to Raymond’s “yes and no”: Obviously, we aren’t Southern California. According to the Forest Service, King County is at higher risk of wildfires than just 60 percent of US counties, while LA County is in the 97th percentile. And without the Chaparral shrubland and Santa Ana winds of California, we’re at lower risk of such a severe fire. But, as Raymond says, “Western Washington is a fire-prone environment. Any ecosystem in the western United States has areas that burn. And have historically burned.” We can see that pattern reflected over the last 150 years, Raymond says, and our region has had at least one like this in our very recent history: the 2020 Labor Day Fires in northwest Oregon. That September, a combination of these same conditions—ignition events, fuel, and high winds—burned more than a million acres in the Pacific Northwest, including almost 200,000 acres of National Forest land. “The Labor Day fires in 2020 in Oregon are very much an example of large, fast-moving fires in our wetter forest types of Western Washington. So, yes, it can happen here,” she says. So what do we do about it? To understand fire management, it helps to learn one new vocabulary term: Wildland Urban Interface (WUI). It refers to the area where urban development and natural landscape (which they define as areas that are at least 50 percent burnable vegetation) either meet or intermix. Anyone talking about fire risk in our region will refer you to the Washington Department of Natural Resources’s WUI maps (pronounced woo-wee, like wookie). WUI maps help us visualize the way we’re encroaching on burnable land. wa dept of natural resources Wildfires aren’t likely to touch densely urban areas—concrete doesn’t burn well. But our suburbs press against the Cascades. “Washington has always been a place where the land largely dictates how humans can live,” the Department of Natural Resources wrote in their primer for the WUI maps. “Our waterways define our cities’ boundaries. Our hills and mountains limit the extent of our sprawl.” But as our population grows (and our housing crisis increases), and we push the limits of that sprawl, we increase our chance of encountering fires instead of just oppressive, opaque (and toxic) smoke conditions. The WUI maps show the “interface” in red and orange. (Don’t let that confuse you—DNR emphasizes that the maps do not represent fire risk, just development.) But several of our major suburbs are deep in that interface. Newcastle, Sammamish, Issaquah, and Woodinville are all surrounded by red and orange. When those suburbs were built, wildfires were a rare concern on this side of the Cascades. Just a decade ago, there were twice as many fire starts in Eastern Washington than on our side. But for the first time in 2023, we outnumbered Eastern Washington. This is where Raymond urges us to focus less on the possibility of a catastrophic wildfire like LA’s, and more on the increasing reality of our smaller fires—1,000 or 10,000 acres, say. Those are increasing with climate change, and will continue to do so. Which means our Wildland Urban Interface is more likely to encounter them every year. “From an ecological perspective, they’re not very meaningful,” she says. “But when they’re in the Wildland Urban Interface, they can be really consequential. They won’t necessarily take off like fires do in a wind event, but those are ones that can put homes at risk.” In a lot of ways, it feels like we’re preparing for these incidents from scratch in Western Washington. To start, fire experts are battling our lack of wildfire muscle memory, so to speak. “You talk to people in California, and a lot of people are like, ‘Yeah, I’ve been through an evacuation before. I remember 20 years ago, we evacuated here, or we evacuated when I was a kid,’” Raymond says. “There’s so many people who live here in Western Washington that that is not in their memory at all.” Sheri Badger, the Public Information Officer for King County’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM), is part of the team that’s helping us build that muscle memory. She says the office has only been focusing seriously on wildfires for about five years. And the Bolt Creek Fire in 2022, she says, which burned more than 10,000 acres in King and Snohomish Counties, was the event that shook them into action. “Before that, it was always ‘Yes, this could happen here.’ But having an example of, ‘Yes, this did happen here,’ was really instrumental, I think, in kick-starting a lot of our efforts.” Wildfires are only one of 14 hazards that their office prepares the county for, ranging from dam failure to volcanoes to cyberterrorism. And they’ve prepared an “all hazards response” that can be applied to most of them. That can affect things like how our transit system responds, and how they send out alerts through SMS. But realistically, our region is much more prepared to respond to an earthquake than to a wildfire. There are some fire-specific projects. The Office of Emergency Management is in their third year of implementing their “Ready, Set, Go” evacuation messaging (they found that Levels 1, 2, and 3 were too confusing for people). “This is something that is very familiar to people in the eastern part of the state, but for us here, it’s not,” Badger says. “Ready” means evacuation is possible in your area. Keep track of local media, check on your neighbors, identify evacuation routes, make sure your go kit is up to date. “Set” means evacuation is likely to happen in your area with short notice. Get your go kit in your car and be ready to move. “Go” means get the hell out. Follow emergency officials’ instructions and don’t come back until officials tell you to. In all stages, they say, leave if you feel unsafe. Our fire response is clearly still in its infancy, though. Five years is nothing in County Bureaucracy Time, and there are so many more factors that can inform how we relate to these fires before evacuation: building codes, landscaping, insurance. Last year, an investigation by KING 5 found that the Washington State Office of the Insurance Commissioner received more complaints of people being dropped by their insurance provider for wildfire risk in the first half of 2024 than the last two years combined. Right now, a lot of that wildfire prep is left to individual decisions—to landscape with slow-burning trees or to build with more wildfire-resistant materials. For people who are eager to manage their fire risk themselves, Badger points to programs like the National Fire Protection Association’s Firewise, which provides resources so communities work together to take control of their own fire mitigation. But as the Trump administration strips climate scientists out of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which tracks wildfire conditions, we’re going to be more and more dependent on our local government to protect and prepare us for these increasing hazards. I asked Badger if they felt like they were building a plane while they were flying it. “Yes,” she says. “But also, it’s not a new concept. It’s just new to us. Being able to take a look at the places around us—Eastern Washington, California, Eastern Oregon—we can see the plane they’ve built as we’re building ours.” ...read more read less