Will blankets of wildfire smoke be our new seasonal normal?

We’ve experienced days and weeks of hazy skies in the Puget Sound region. And while air quality has been unhealthy in some towns and cities around Western Washington, it's been downright dangerous in others.

Amanda Monthei hosts the podcast “Life with Fire.” She spent two seasons as a hotshot fighting wildland fires and now spends her summers as a public information officer on wildfires. Hotshot crews are some of the most highly trained, skilled, and experienced firefighters in the U.S. Monthei talked to KUOW’s Kim Malcolm about how we manage fires on the west side of the Cascades, and what she expects smoke-wise in the coming years.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kim Malcolm: You wrote a Twitter thread recently about why the Cascades wildfire smoke is so bad. Why is it?

Amanda Monthei: It's kind of a three-part answer. Part of it is that there's a lot of fuel on these west-side forests. A big reason for that is obviously we get a lot of moisture. We have a lot of things growing. And then we also don't see fire very often over here. The fire regime on the west side is 100 to 300 years in many places. That means we're not getting a lot of fire. But when we do get fire, it can burn really intensely because of that fuel.

Another thing is firefighter safety. That just means that they're not going to put people in those really steep areas where the fires are currently burning. Fires in the North Cascades are in really remote terrain. That's really hard for firefighter access. With that destabilized slope from the fire, you have more rolling rocks, more falling trees. Getting folks out there is really difficult.

The third part is just aircraft is largely ineffective in these west side forests. You can put water on it, you can put retardant on it, but more than likely it's not actually even going to reach the ground in some of these really heavily timbered areas. So, it's not as effective as it would be on the east side of the Cascades.

I'm thinking about Highway 2, and all the communities strung along that, and how hard the firefighters have been working. What were they trying to do there?

The first few days of the fire burning were really high intensity, which means that they burnt a lot of the ground fuel, they burned a lot of the larger fuels, like a lot of the larger trees and those root systems. That contributes a lot to erosion in the future. But along that road, they made sure to allow it to burn relatively slowly, in a sort of backing pattern, as we would call it. It was backing down the hill, and it was moving relatively slowly.

What that does is it consumes the ground vegetation, but it keeps some of those larger trees in place so that they have those root systems that can really hold the soil together as we get rain in the future. Ensuring that that road stays open in the event of any potential mudslides in the future was important to the managers on this fire. And it will certainly pay off in the future because it did burn at such a low intensity down to the road.

If firefighters are not working to stop the fire, to extinguish it, what is eventually going to make it stop burning?

It's going to be the rain that we get on Friday, that we know is coming. It's obviously taken a long time to come. That's rather unprecedented for this area. I think you can normally expect these big rain events to come by around mid-September, or maybe even early October. But to wait until almost late October for one of these big rain events to put fires out is unprecedented.

They were looking at long-range forecasts when they made these decisions about the management strategy. They weren't necessarily seeing rain in the forecast. However, eventually, you can expect it to come. That's really what we're waiting for, what we call a “season-ending” event. That's really going to be coming on Friday and into this next weekend.

You wrote that it's pretty likely we're going to see some similar fire seasons and impacts like these on the west side of the Cascades as time goes on. Is letting fires burn themselves out and all the smoke that comes from that the price we're going to have to pay?

I think to a certain degree, yes. It's hard to say if we're going to have a similar fire season next year, even in the next decade. But I think we have to prepare for future fire seasons like this, getting those public health policies in place, ensuring that we have those proper filtration systems and air purifiers and N95 masks, just encouraging making those actions towards this potentially being a future that we have to live with.

Whether we actually see those impacts is kind of moot. I would say that it's important to prepare for them regardless, because I do think it's inevitable that we'll see more summers like this, whether that's next year or in the next decade. Encouraging those solutions right now is important and finding ways that you can implement those solutions in your own lives is critical.

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.