Wildfires have so far burned nearly 2 million acres of land throughout Oregon this year, the highest annual burned acreage the state’s department of forestry has ever seen and nearly double the 1.1 million acres burned during the notorious 2020 wildfire season.
The Oregon Department of Forestry (ODF) reportedly spent over $250 million fighting the fires, drying up the entirety of the department’s budget, according to local broadcast station KGW.
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“The scale … people have to see it to understand just how many acres burned across the state this summer,” ODF Deputy Director for Fire Operations Kyle Williams told KGW. “Just because the smoke wasn’t present in our more populated areas doesn’t mean that (wildfires) weren’t deeply impactful.”
The costs for wildland firefighting alone chokes out the state’s entire emergency budget. ODF is asking the state’s Emergency Board, which allocates additional funding outside of legislative sessions, for $40 million from its general fund, KGW reports. The problem is that the E-Board only has $43 million in its general fund for the remainder of the year, meaning if wildland firefighting gets priority, other emergency needs the state may face will be strained until the legislative sessions starts back up.
On top of that, ODF will probably need much more money this year as wildfires continue to burn. A recent Legislative Fiscal Office analysis found the department won’t be able to pay its debts by November, with an estimated shortfall of $54 million by January.
“I would like to think that future fire seasons won’t be quite at this scale, but I think the statistics tell me that’s probably not going to be accurate,” Williams told KGW. “The conditions we’ve got on the landscape are going to drive us to a place we haven’t been before.”
Climate change, overgrown forests, and people are the top causes for Oregon’s worsening wildfire seasons, according to an Oregon Forest Resources Institute report. The high burned acreage totals aren’t unprecedented; fire experts previously warned massive wildfires in the state were a disaster waiting to happen and part of a larger trend in the Western U.S. Even though the total number of yearly Oregon wildfires have remained steady over the past decade, the total amount of acres burned per year have increased dramatically.
“Factors contributing to this explosion of ‘megafires’ include overgrown forests and the effects of climate change, which have led to extreme weather, drought and insect infestations that weaken and kill trees, making forests more prone to fire damage,” the report said.
“The good news is there are many actions homeowners and landowners can take to reduce the fuels wildfires need to spread … These include clearing flammable vegetation and debris around homes, pruning or thinning trees, and using controlled burns to reduce dry brush and other fuels in forests, rangelands and grasslands adjacent to homes.”