After the fire, the land begins again

When the 2023 Eagle Bluff wildfire burned over 16,000 acres in Okanogan County, it swept through a portion of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s (WDFW) Scotch Creek Wildlife Area, impacting habitat for a number of species.

The damage was severe enough to prompt concerns about the spread of invasive weeds and soil degradation. To mitigate these post-fire effects, the agency, in partnership with neighboring Bureau of Land Management, intervened with an ambitious replanting project.

Navigating an isolated location with steep terrain, the project took a creative approach to efficiently replanting the area: dropping 6,000 pounds of native grass seeds from a helicopter across 600 acres.

“They’re giant bags of seeds,” said Nicole Jordan, spokesperson for WDFW’s North Central region. “They just load them up and fly them off. It's incredible.”

The replanting process takes time, Jordan noted. However, it will hopefully ensure the landscape recovers to a healthy state, reducing erosion and restoring habitat for species such as white-tailed deer, mule deer, bighorn sheep, California quail and more.

Just a year later, organizations pursued similar reseeding efforts in the Wenatchee Foothills, where suppression work on the 2024 Balsamroot Fire left the area vulnerable to the spread of cheatgrass. The fast spreading weed dries out early in the summer, making it prime fuel for future wildfires.

“The problem with cheatgrass is that it outcompetes all of the great species that make up a rich, diverse shrub steppe ecology, and one that is pretty resilient to fire,” said Patrick Haggerty, Cascadia Conservation District’s Forest and Community Resilience Program Manager.

Reseeding can be an effective strategy for rehabilitating a burned landscape, particularly where suppression work has disturbed the soil. But it is not always the solution.

“Nature is incredibly resilient,” said Collin Haffey, Post-Fire Recovery Program Manager with Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR). “I've seen time and time again…a lot of rebounding and a lot of resilience built into these systems that have adapted with fire over millennia.”

No fire is the same, nor is the prescription for recovery. After a fire burns, land managers start with assessing the aftermath. While some fires cause minimal damage, others may leave lasting impacts. Loss of vegetation can expose soil to erosion. Water runoff may cause flooding and mudflow. Sediments moving downstream may damage houses or impact water supply. 

On federal lands, one of the first steps in assessing those risks is often a Burned Area Emergency Response, or BAER, assessment. According to the Forest Service, this team often comprises hydrologists, soil scientists, engineers, biologists and others who rapidly evaluate the burned area and prescribe emergency stabilization treatments. They also make recommendations for longer rehabilitation efforts, which can last for several years after the fact.

But as the western United States contends with an increasing number of larger wildfires moving beyond boundaries of federal land, more and more state and local agencies are finding ways to address post-fire recovery as the impacts linger on state and private land.

"We really started finding that there was a need for support for communities and landowners post fire around the 2012 fires…The 2015 fires really emphasized the need,” said Haggerty.

After a fire, Cascadia Conservation District works with private landowners in or near a burned area — which can be susceptible to flooding and mud flows long after the fact. After the 2015 Chelan Complex Fire, Haggerty recalled making hundreds of site visits to private properties to offer advice and assistance with hazard risk and land recovery efforts.

Around the same time, the state was beginning to recognize the importance of post-fire recovery.

“The ultimate genesis of this [DNR] program was the 2014 and 2015 fires in Chelan and Okanogan counties, which were really an eye-opening event to the folks in Washington,” said Haffey.

DNR’s Post-Fire Recovery Program was established with funding by the Wildfire Response, Forest Restoration and Community Resilience account created in 2021 by the Washington Legislature. Though the program really started to take shape in 2023, said Haffey.

The program works at all levels of the disaster recovery cycle, such as stabilizing and preventing degradation to natural and cultural resources, minimizing threats to life and property, and investing in long-term efforts to increase the resilience of the landscape and communities against future disturbance.

“All disasters start local and end local. And so, what we've really focused on in the development of the program is creating capacity at the local level…working with counties and Conservation Districts,” said Haffey.

Over the past three years, the program has worked across Okanogan, Douglas and Chelan counties to assist with post-fire flood risks, interagency assessments and outreach.

Following last year’s Lower Sugarloaf and Labor Mountain fires, the state worked with the federal BAER team to build a post-fire assessment together, which was then presented to local leadership. This type of cross-boundary collaboration and capacity building, Haffey believes, is one of the program’s best accomplishments thus far.

“We're getting close to coming up with almost a defined strategy for what post-fire, cross-boundary collaboration looks like in Washington, and that's exciting,” said Haffey.

These assessments take into account the variety of impacts the same fire may have across a landscape and where, if at all, intervention is needed. In some places, post-fire work can build on the ecological benefits of fire; in others, it can mitigate damage left behind.

“In a lot of cases, we can let the landscape tell us where it needs help…and that's the spot where we can intervene,” said Haffey.

The state is also starting to look at post-fire response before one even begins. In Chelan County specifically, a pilot project is underway to complete pre-planning for post-fire recovery.

“Trying to get post-fire planning done ahead of time is critical. Otherwise you're stuck flat-footed,” said Haffey. “Post-fire recovery is like moving from a sprint to a marathon, and that's a really hard transition to make.”

According to Haffey, the project is modeled after Colorado’s Wildfire Ready Watersheds Program, which identifies vulnerable watersheds and develops strategies that lessen the long-term effects of wildfires.

“What this looks like when we're done is we have a watershed where we've identified the fire risk and we're doing things to mitigate that hazard,” said Haffey.

This could involve forest thinning, prescribed fire, and stream restoration, while also preparing infrastructure for downstream impacts, such as preparing drinking water intakes or irrigation diversions for increased sediment loading.

“The thing I'm always reminded of in post-fire recovery is just how interconnected everything is,” said Haffey. “We sometimes try to make distinctions between community and landscape, and those things blur in the post-fire recovery, and we realize just how important it is to take holistic approaches to recovery work and recovery planning.”

Taylor Caldwell: 509-433-7276 or taylor@ward.media