Oregon conservationist on steps to prevent community loss during wildfire season

Ralph Bloemers has spent over two decades working in and around wildfire science and technology. He’s used documentary filmmaking to probe and document wildfires, and he contends that while wildfires are inevitable in Oregon, catastrophic community loss doesn’t have to be.

Bloemers makes a case for wildfire-readiness techniques homeowners can use to reduce the risk of community conflagration or urban wildfire, like what Spokane communities endured earlier this summer.

We’ll speak to Bloemers about his recommendations for how homeowners can assist firefighters through wildfire readiness techniques and how his work documenting wildfires has informed his perspective on wildfire management.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Ralph Bloemers has spent more than two decades documenting wildfire behavior, forest ecology and community resilience. He’s a filmmaker and an organizer who says that while wildfires are inevitable in Oregon, catastrophic community loss does not have to be. Ralph Bloemers, welcome to Think Out Loud.

Ralph Bloemers: Thanks for having me, Dave.

Miller: I want to start with your own land and your own recent experience. How close did the Grasshopper Fire get to your property this summer?

Bloemers: The fire started in an area that had been managed, cut, roaded since the ‘50s, ‘60s, and that was in the southern part of the eastern Mount Hood, south of Badger Creek. And when it ignited, we’d been chasing fire throughout western states and in Oregon with my crew – we were on Akawa and Bench – and I sent Connor Nelson over there to take a look. It didn’t seem like they were gonna have trouble catching it. But ultimately they didn’t catch it, and there was a couple of big wind-driven runs. I’m also in this world of fire nerd and on NASA daily briefings, so I saw that there was going to be an east wind coming, meaning a wind out of the east from the interior pushing it towards Mount Hood. So I knew it was going to make some big runs. It had made mostly wind-driven runs and then sort of skunked around, meaning it didn’t have a lot of activity.

I told my wife, close up the house, let’s turn on the smoke filter, because the smoke is coming. And at night it came to Bennett Ridge and then down to Highway 35. If anybody uses the Watch Duty app, you could see the heat signal. But those heat signals that are on the app are fairly coarse, and they’re also infrequent passes. So I had sort of advanced information and I could see how it was lining up towards the north side of Mount Hood, coming down 35. And because of how the wind works around Mount Hood, it’s swirling all around, there’s eddy currents. It’s like a river wind hits it, but then it pushes it all different directions. I could see it was pretty much lined up to the north side of Mount Hood and Parkdale.

Our orchard and forest land is right there off of Cooper Spur Road, so it was 1.75 miles at the closest point. But it had the potential, because it had so much energy, to jump 35. It was spotting half mile, at times and making big runs. Like it made one big 7-12-mile run down into the grasslands of Friend, Oregon and burned some homes.

I’m one of those folks that just has a lot … The knowledge that’s out there for everyone, but I’m kind of in an advanced place with that in terms of being able to see out two, three days. So it was close.

Miller: What was it like to have a fire that close, a mile away from your own property, after spending decades focused on fire behavior and firewise knowledge, in various ways. Is this the closest a fire had gotten to you?

Bloemers: Yeah, pretty much. It was both personal and professional at the same time. There’s a lot of folks in the community in the upper valley in Hood River and Wasco County that I know, that were in various stages. So for us, the buildings and structures we have on the property are ready for fire. They’re ready for fire without a firefighter being there. That’s how I roll now, owning the risk, being my own first responder by preparing well before fire comes. And it’s not a water thing. If an ember lands there, there’s going to be nothing for it to convert into a flame to ignite my building. That is done at our place, not in fire season, not in a triage mindset.

It’s still nerve-wracking. You got an orchard, you could have a lot of dry material below your pear and cherry trees that could ignite and torch your trees that you have a huge investment per acre in. It was more threatening, and definitely ended up being damaging, and people lost everything in terms of the material possessions and homes down in Friend, Wamic, Tygh Valley and Pine Hollow on the east side. Cause when the fire got into those grasses, it just goes so much faster.

But I’ve come to the place to accept that there’s really not a lot I can do over space and time with the forest land. We’re backed up to the county forest land and the federal Mount Hood National Forest, the public land. There’s not really a lot we can do, over space and time, to change how that will burn, because it’s just not a fuel-limited system, meaning it’s always going to have an arrangement of fuel – forests, shrubs, grasses – that’s going to grow back if I cut it. Just even keeping the roads open on the property is a mission, so they’re not all overgrown. So I’ve gotten to the place that I’m super home outward, building outward. I just do the low cost stuff well before fire comes so I can be a little more chill when it does come.

Miller: I want to hear more about your prescriptions for homeowners, what you’re saying individuals should be thinking about. But to stay zoomed out for a little bit, we’re not technically out of the fire season, but we are hopefully at the tail end of it. When you look at the overall map of Oregon this year, what stands out to you?

Bloemers: Well, fire perimeters are not what tells you what goes inside, right? That’s an administrative line determined by fire management and fire suppression operations. So if you look in Akawa Butte, it’s a lot of private lands, a lot of roads, some public lands, it had been cut before. That fire ripped because the conditions lined up. It was drought, there were some really strong winds. And at the last minute, Connor Nelson and Michael Sherman were there filming, they were around Henkle Butte. That thing got hit with rain and a hard wind from the west in the last moments, and it was pretty much a miracle that Sisters didn’t get impacted by that fire.

Look at East Evans in Southern Oregon. I mean, that is industrial timberland, heavily cut, managed and replanted, tons of roads that had really strong fire behavior. But largely, again, weather dominated, right? So we had a really low snow pack, really fast drying out fuels, and the conditions lined up for things to go real hard. Rowe Creek, which was a complex north of Prineville, same story, fairly heavily managed and eroded landscape with some wildlands, some maybe designated wilderness areas. But again, extensive treatment history, and that fire ripped. Grasshopper, it’s a mix.

And I think what we see is that the maps tell us the story. The overflights that NASA was doing over Oregon tell us the story. This was largely weather dominated runs of fire, and then the fire suppression operations are just trying to respond within that.

Miller: Just to dig into what you’re saying, and I guess what you’re not saying, because one of the most common refrains in Oregon and in a lot of the West is that there’s too much fuel in the forests – whether we’re talking about understory, brush or a density of trees – that’s different now than it was pre-Forest Service saying “every fire out by 10AM,” in a very different fire regime or different versions of industrial cutting. But the basic argument is that there’s too much fuel in the forest. You’re not talking about that too much right now. In how many parts of the state would you say that that is actually true, and a prime contributor to wildfire?

Bloemers: You look at our mental model, where our understanding comes from around fire, we think it’s a wall of flames and a canopy fire that threatens communities. It’s actually a three-dimensional ember storm and it’s a wind event with fire in it. So let me unpack that. Because sure, some forests have been altered by suppression, by management. And some of those forests, the minority of them, the dry forest type that we find in Eastern Oregon, we can do something to change that trajectory, and then that thing that we do is durable for some years.

But in the Cascades, in Mount Hood, again, I said it’s not a fuel-limited system. You look at the scientific papers, and they basically say it’s not scientifically defensible to try to change that over space and time. So, in Oregon, we got 60 million acres of land. Well, what burned this year? Mostly grass and shrub, probably around 65-70% thus far, I’m still doing the calcs on that. And then in terms of the forest that burned, it was some dry types where you could potentially have an influence over fire behavior. But if you’re going into a patch of forest and changing it, at most, you’re buying a chance that fire might intersect with that patch while it’s modified, before it grows back. And at most, you’re buying potential changed fire behavior.

And here’s the thing, right? We all want our summers back. We want to know where we can send our kids out to camp. We wanna know whether our trip to go see an outdoor concert somewhere in Oregon is gonna be affected. So we’re vulnerable to a promise that man can dominate over nature and deny natural realities. But the natural reality doesn’t care. It doesn’t care whether it’s roaded, managed, industrial timber plantation, wilderness. If the conditions line up and the weather is there, that’s the part of the fire triangle that’s dominating. I’m not saying we don’t do things in forests because we want to get dimensional lumber. We do. We all use and enjoy paper and wood products. But what’s pretty darn clear is that getting paper and wood products is not a strategy to deny natural realities of fire behavior.

It was interesting driving around during the fires and finding people who’d had their homes repaired. And time and again, they said it could be the Rowena Fire, it could be the Eagle Creek Fire, it could be the Grasshopper Fire, there’s gonna be a fire. We’ll catch some of them. We won’t catch some others. It’s gonna be making big runs. Here’s what I can do, local to my home. I think where I come down on this is the broken relationship with fire is: we watch emergency responders and send our thoughts and prayers. The healed relationship is: send our thoughts and prayers, and prepare our homes and make it so they can be more practically effective…

Miller: I want to turn there now. That’s where you really want Oregonians and everybody to be focusing. What specific advice do you have for people, not firefighters but individual homeowners, in terms of preparing for wildfire?

Bloemers: One of my biggest teachers is Jack Cohen. So the guy studied how communities burn for nearly four decades. And frankly, he’s pretty traumatized by it. It’s pretty hard to see. And I spend a lot of time with communities impacted by fire. And in particular, when you go to Paradise or you go to the Santiam Canyon, you’ll see people who have been through it. And what they do now is they go and try to learn what they can do to change the conditions around their home.

So most home loss, about 90% Dave, is in fast fires. Think of it as I said earlier, wind event with fire in it. And so the flame front is passing, the fire is nearly horizontal, and it’s sending embers well ahead of the flame front. Then the flame front passes pretty quickly by your house. And in that moment when it passes and the embers land, what you want to do is make sure your gutters clean, so that the fine material that’s in your gutter doesn’t ignite your eave. Or that the venting on your house on the crawl, the attic or whatever setup you got in your house is not 0.25-inch mesh, so those embers don’t get inside and find stuff. And then if you have stuff around your house – doormat, garbage can, synthetic couch cushions, a hot tub cover – you wanna make sure that stuff is secured so that an ember lands on it, it doesn’t ignite something made of plastic, cause those things burn real hot.

Mostly you can keep your trees. People think it’s a wall of flames and the trees are a threat, but you limb up your trees. If you have those trees, I’m gonna work for this tree. I’m gonna clean up the needles. I’m gonna limit, I’m gonna take care of it. Most of the hardwoods, like oaks, they don’t really burn particularly hot. Jack did these experiments in Canada that are in one of the films I made, “Elemental: Reimagine Wildfire.” He’s also in several shorts that we have on Fire Safe People TV on YouTube. But basically, a tree on fire does not generate enough radiant heat to ignite a structure. The game is not trying to protect against radiant heat, for the most part. It’s trying to interrupt the physics of an ember becoming a flame proximate to your structure. And it’s been shown time and again, and we’ve seen saves of people who did these things, and it’s black all around their house and their house has survived. The narrative becomes, this is a miracle. No, it’s just straight physics.

And it’s actually fairly low cost. It’s a weekend project you can do with your kids. You replace the bark mulch around your house with maybe a nice combination of river rock and some pavers. Or, if you don’t have money for river rock and pavers you can do bare dirt. You move the shrubs away from the house and you get your windows back. You can still have shrubs at 5-30 feet, but you might wanna bonsai tree them a bit, right? So if they drop material, make sure that that dead material’s out of there. And then there’s some plants that are particularly dangerous, like juniper, cypress, that can burn really hot – some folk folks call them green gas cans. They can blow up 800 degrees and crack your windows, which you definitely don’t want because then embers and flames will get in on your interior, which again is petrochemicals and synthetics, and those are much more flammable things.

Miller: You’re talking here about what people can do to their homes and the land around it. I’m curious about where those homes are. I saw a recent federal study that found that between 1990 and 2020, the number of homes in the so-called “wildland-urban interface” – basically the outer edge of the human-built environment, where that touches forest or other kinds of wildlands – that’s increased 46% in that 30-year period. How does that affect what you’re talking about?

Bloemers: I love that you asked this question. So fire, again, channeling Doctor Jack Cohen, is not a land use thing. It is stochastic, in other words, random event. We don’t know next year, the next week or the next month where the ignition is gonna occur. We also don’t know necessarily where the conditions are gonna line up. So these maps, wildland-urban interface maps or other hazard maps – and props to Christopher Dunn at Oregon State University, very thoughtful, very intelligent, a great mapping guy, fire behavior – they’re generally telling us where fire’s going to be more frequent, these hazard maps. But what happened in Labor Day 2020? What burned? Well, the medium and the low, Echo Mountain on the coast. So in a hotter, drier world, I think the reality is we’re pretty much all in fire country.

Miller: But isn’t it an important thing to say that, probabilistically, that fire, if it’s more frequent in certain areas, that’s important data for us as humans to think about as we’re making policy decisions or insurance underwriting decisions about where people are living? I feel like you’re skating past it. But it seems that yes, it’s not a sure thing that it’s going to be there. But if it’s more likely, that seems like important data.

Bloemers: It is. It’s where we might do more investment. But I guess what I’m saying is some people say, “I’m not in the WUI, I’m OK.” And I worry that that means that people are gonna learn the super hard way. And what you learn from the ignition science, whether it’s the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, Fire Safety Research Institute, Missoula Fire Lab, all these people that have studied conflagration, is that the risk is essentially and the vulnerability is at the house and proximate to the house. And what we’ve seen is the Marshall Fire wasn’t even on a risk map, in the Front Range of Colorado, [and] 1,058 homes burned in six hours. People didn’t think that Lahaina had a long fire history and it wasn’t on a WUI map, and 102 people died and thousands of homes were burned in a short span of time…

Miller: So it sounds like you’re saying you don’t want us to look at these maps and underestimate the risk in places that are not on it – that’s your biggest concern – not that we would overestimate the risk in the WUI, but underestimate it outside of it?

Bloemers: Right. And I think it’s a communications thing. I think it’s just simpler to say, “I live in fire country,” and own that. And yeah, on the west side of the Cascades, the frequency that you might experience an intense wildfire is less than it would be in, let’s say, Sisters or Bend. But when we do get one, we’re gonna get one at 10 out of 10. And look out. What I wanna do is help people avoid humanitarian disasters.

I’m here today with about 300 fire survivors from across the nation at a conference. It’s the worst club to be in with definitely some of the best people. But that’s what drives me: How do we get society to see themselves in it? And I think while WUI is a good planning tool to some extent, with some limitations, it isn’t really a good communications tool. They’re just going to be like, “Am I in it or am I out of it? And if I’m out of it, I’m good.” And that’s not the reality.

Miller: I want to just move on to one other issue that you spent a lot of time on, which is what happens within areas that have burned over time. We could spend a whole hour talking about this, or a lot more time than that. But briefly, what has your experience been going back month after month or year after year in places that saw serious fires? What have you learned about regeneration, resilience, or the opposite?

Bloemers: Well, using fire as a tool, prescribed fire, really has a lot of benefits, and that’s taking a lot of the fine material. It really depends, there’s a lot of different ways to work in a forest and thin. I would just say in Grasshopper, it was interesting going on a tour with the ops chief for a full day, both where the ignition was and seeing that there was extensive work done in the area where the fire ignited, and then there was also untreated slash piles that were in some cases two stories high. But when I’ve looked, and I’ve been able to fly to some extent outside the temporary flight restriction and look at the patterns, you just see black in certain patches. But largely that was because there was a wind-driven run. So part of the analysis, Dave, is what happened on the day the fire moved through there. What was the fire weather? Because there’s so much more going on than just the fuel component. We could talk extensively about that.

I think the other piece that I just wanted to make sure to mention, is [people] have a collective anxiety about how are our forests doing. So one of the things I did, and I encourage people to go there and take a look, is in the wake of the Eagle Creek Fire or the Labor Day fires in Opal Creek, I set out with dozens of cameras and placed time lapse and wildlife photography, so people can see for themselves how things are progressing in severely burned patches, and how the wildlife are doing. And what we see around Highway 35 with the Grasshopper Fire in an area that was wildland, not treated or managed in any particular way, some roads, off of 35 up to Bennett Ridge, we see mosaic. Because the fire, when it was moving down there, it was moving sort of downslope and there were some burning operations. It’s fairly classic mosaic, in other words, burn patches, unburned patches. So within Grasshopper, you can see with the NASA satellite data and the flyovers, that significant portions of the 90,000 acres are unburned in places that had treatments that occurred in the southern portion.

Miller: Ralph, thanks very much.

Bloemers: Alright, you’re welcome.

Miller: That’s Ralph Bloemers. He is the director of Fire Safe Communities for the nonprofit Green Oregon, a documentary filmmaker based in Portland.

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