Seeing Big Picture Of A Million Acres Of Flames In Northwest

We experience the eerie, smoky sunsets. We hear the fire names like Wolverine and North Star.

These are just small glimpses into the huge picture of the West’s wildfires in 2015. Randy Eardly sees that long view at the National Interagency Fire Center. He told KUOW's David Hyde that nearly 1.3 million acres have burned so far in Washington and Oregon.

“It seems to be fire everywhere you look,” said Eardly, chief of external affairs for the center, which coordinates all wildland firefighting in the U.S. The biggest blazes “create such a plume of smoke above them that they start creating their own weather, their own winds.”

Alaska had severe fires early on, he said, but “we had had a pretty moderate, even below normal, fire season in the lower 48 states.”

And then …

“It’s like we went from 0 to 60 in about three days” when a series of lightning storms struck along the West Coast.

He said the firefighting landscape has changed dramatically since he started on a fire crew in the 1970s.

“The year 2000 was really kind of a watershed year. Prior to that if we burned more than 4 million acres in a season, that was a lot,” he said. “Since the year 2000, we’ve had progressively more severe fire seasons. We’ve approached 10 million acres (for all of the U.S., including Alaska) in two years. We’ve been above 8 million acres in several years. Already this year we’re above 8 million acres.”

He said part of the problem for firefighting is the huge expansion in population in wildfire-prone areas from the 1990s on.

“It’s a very different world today,” he said.