Get ready for climate change! Before it’s too late

I was in the shower, getting ready for my nephew’s wedding, when my husband appeared. He was pointing to his iPhone, and I could tell it was bad news: the notification we had been dreading all day.

As of 4:10 p.m. on July 19, our home in southwest Washington state was in the evacuation zone for a major wildfire that started the previous day. The text message from our county sheriff’s office said we “should plan to evacuate at a moment’s notice, or evacuate now if you feel unsafe.” We were at Level 1 of the three-tiered “ready, set, go” evacuation system used throughout the United States. Closer to the fire, some people in our community had already lost their homes or were receiving messages telling them to “go now!”

The Burdoin Fire eventually grew to about 11,000 acres, with a team of 870 people and more than 100 engines assigned to the fire, plus an assortment of hand crews and aircraft and other fire resources. The crews pitched their tents on the sports fields at our local high school.

Fire camp at the local high school. Image courtesy of White Salmon Valley School District/Facebook

At this writing, two weeks after the fire started, it is 90 percent contained. Close to 500 people are still working to secure the lines made around the fire’s perimeter and remove the miles of hose laid. The fire’s cause has not yet been determined, but about 85 percent of all wildfires in Washington are human-caused. Most of them are avoidable. And I have seen firsthand what hundreds of people working together can accomplish when they resolve to extinguish a fire.

That gives me some hope for the future, even though I know that climate change is making wildfires worse. Scientists who studied 21 years of data from two NASA satellites that detect active fires found that “extreme wildfires have become more frequent, more intense, and larger.” And because more people have built homes in harm’s way, wildfires have also become more expensive.

The Burdoin Fire reminded me how much has changed since my husband and I moved to this area more than 33 years ago. Fire is not new to the Pacific Northwest, which despite its rainy reputation has a prolonged dry season. But the risks have increased with each passing year, and some of these changes have been so incremental that they are only apparent to people who remember what this place was like decades ago, when the local landscape and the global atmosphere were changing at a much slower pace.

Those changes, too, are human-caused. But in a world where many people haven’t even learned how to avoid starting a fire, it is hard to summon the resources and public willpower needed to slow and eventually contain the deforestation, land use changes, and burning of fossil fuels that are threatening not just our own homes but the entire planet’s life support systems.

Level 1, get ready. We were determined not to let the fire stop us from attending our nephew’s long-anticipated wedding—but also unwilling to leave our pets and essential items behind, perhaps never to be seen again. We had already gathered the items on our evacuation checklist in anticipation of the fire spreading. When we got the sheriff’s text message, we sprang into action. We loaded cat carriers, photo albums, important papers, and camping supplies into our teardrop trailer and hitched it to one of our vehicles. Off we went to the wedding venue 45 minutes away, parking in a shady area nearby and donning clean clothes in time to take our seats before the ceremony began. Call it a “pre-vacuation.”

The next day, back home again, we were monitoring our radio scanner closely when we heard a report that neighbors a few miles away were battling a fire at their home and requesting help from the dispatcher, who told them nobody was immediately available. Most of the firefighters were battling the fire on a front miles away, where the wind was pushing the fire toward a small town. Meanwhile, though, gusts were also sending “fingers” of fire creeping up a couple of canyons toward our neighborhood.

We also learned that several roads near us were closing, shutting down some of our potential evacuation routes. The “go now” evacuation zone had expanded to include a short piece of our main exit road. In an abundance of caution bordering on panic, I left for town with the trailer and pets. I stayed there for a few hours, while my husband did additional work to prepare our house and lawn. After a few hours, when more fire crews had arrived to protect our neighborhood, I felt safe to return home.

Level 2, get set. On July 23, a second fire broke out near my home. The Snyder Canyon Fire, believed to be lightning-caused, was in a steep, rugged canyon that was difficult for firefighters to access. On the scanner, I could hear the anxiety in their voices as they searched for the source of the smoke and a way to get to it.

Later that day, several other fires erupted simultaneously in another part of our county. On the scanner, I heard the dispatcher tell everyone to stop talking at once, so she could understand the reports coming in from all over.

We were fortunate that there were already so many fire crews and aircraft in the area to fight the Burdoin Fire. The town of Klickitat, Washington, and surrounding areas were evacuated for the Snyder Canyon Fire, but it only grew to 53 acres and was fully contained by July 29. The other, smaller fires were contained almost immediately.

No homes were lost in the Snyder Canyon Fire, but the Burdoin Fire destroyed 19 homes and damaged 47 homes, according to the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center. Another 80 “minor structures,” such as barns and sheds, were destroyed or damaged. The fire threatened or destroyed a total of 1,443 residences and 441 minor structures.

On July 23, a week after the Burdoin Fire started and while it was still only 5 percent contained, I was surprised to see an article in the New York Times about “savoring country pleasures at five new getaways.” The lead photo was of a recently opened “glamping” resort near White Salmon, Washington—the closest town to my home and the command center for the Complex Incident Management Team fighting the fire.

Two days earlier, Conde Nasté Traveler had published a piece about the “epic” food and wine to be found in the Columbia River Gorge. The writer, who stayed at two inns in White Salmon, described the “riot of purple lupines and yolk yellow balsamroot” during wildflower season at the Catherine Creek Recreation Area. She praised the local restaurants and wineries. But by the time the article was published, Catherine Creek was in flames and closed to the public, and multiple wineries and vineyards within the fire perimeter had been damaged. Neither article mentioned the Burdoin Fire.

The travel articles were most likely reported and written weeks or months before they were published, by writers who don’t live in the area, so I can’t fault the publications for the unintended insult of “savoring” king-size beds and gas fireplaces in oversize tents while evacuees were sleeping on cots in a nearby church. The more concerning insensitivity is that wildfires have become so commonplace in the West that a fire bigger than Manhattan does not attract the slightest attention of editors in New York. After all, it was only one of 32 large fires actively being suppressed in the United States on August 1. They have burned more than 900,000 acres.

Fire season is far from over, and Washington State is now in an unprecedented third year of drought. More and more of my neighbors are reporting that they are losing their home insurance because they live in a wildfire-prone area; one household got notice while the Burdoin Fire was still burning.

The forests and climate around my home have changed dramatically since I moved here. This area experienced widespread logging early in the 20th century. But during that era, logged areas grew back naturally into a diverse forest of mixed-age and mixed-species trees, and many trees were inaccessible without modern equipment. Today, automated logging operations typically spare only small clusters or strips of trees, leaving vast stretches of bare dirt that are much hotter and drier than a shady, transpiring forest. Even “thinning” leaves forests hotter, drier, and more vulnerable to wind.

Some scientific evidence suggests that surface winds in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere have been speeding up since about 2010. However, winds vary a lot from one region to another, and wind hasn’t yet been adequately factored into climate models. It deserves more attention. Temperature, humidity, and “fuel load” are important variables, but wind is often the key factor that turns a spark into a fast-spreading inferno.

There is also a lot of uncertainty surrounding the funding for firefighting. A “complex incident” like the Burdoin Fire requires coordinated teams of local volunteers, state firefighters, and federal crews. The US Forest Service’s budget has in recent years been largely devoted to fighting fires, but the Trump administration has been cutting the agency’s programs, staff, and funding.

On July 24, the Agriculture Department announced a plan to close all nine of the Forest Service’s regional offices—including the Pacific Northwest office in Portland, Oregon—as well as the 100-year-old Pacific Northwest Research Station. Some of the work now done in the Northwest will be relocated to a “hub location” in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Level 3, go now! Although a fire is a fast-moving disaster, and climate change is a slower-moving one, there are some similarities in how people respond. If you’re like me, first you hope the problem isn’t a serious one and that someone else will make it go away. When the fire begins to feel like a personal threat—you see or smell smoke, for instance, or you learn that the fire is close to where a friend lives—your worry grows, and you try to get more information. At some point, you might decide that the threat warrants urgent action. You made an evacuation plan and checklist in advance, right? Because it’s hard to think straight when a wildfire is coming toward you.

The “go now!” point is different for each person. Some people in my community felt very comfortable carrying on with their daily lives and waiting for a Level 3 notification before taking any action. Others decided they would not leave even if ordered to do so. And some of us evacuated, however temporarily, even before we were ordered to do so.

I don’t like to play with fire. In hindsight, my husband and I could have gone to the wedding unencumbered and danced into the night. We could have saved ourselves all that trouble packing and unpacking. Our cats surely would have been happier.

We could also just stop worrying about how the climate is changing and enjoy ourselves as the world burns. We could ignore the incremental changes that are piling up into a colossal cluster-catastrophe. We could decide we’re not going to bother doing anything until it’s too late to make a difference.

But when the Burdoin Fire had already charred thousands of acres, I didn’t hear anyone saying they didn’t want firefighters to suppress the fire before it got to their house. And who wouldn’t want to stop a fire even if it wouldn’t reach their house for another decade or two, when their grandkids would be living there?

Unlike a hurricane or a flash flood, climate change and fires are preventable disasters. Humans created most of the problem, and humans have the capacity to fix it. All we lack is the political will and funding to hire the people who can help us put this fire out before it kills us.

According to the National Interagency Fire Center, close to 41,000 wildfires have burned more than 3.25 million acres in the United States in 2025. That is more than 10 times the number of lightning-caused fires. “Each one of those preventable starts had the potential to put firefighters, communities, and landscapes at risk,” the fire center warned.

Maybe everyone in the country should receive an urgent “GET READY” notice like the one my husband and I got. Preparation and prevention are the only sensible ways to deal with risks like wildfire and climate change.

A week after that first message, we got a second one, alerting us that the evacuation areas had been updated and roads were being opened for local traffic. Imagine how great it would feel someday to get a similar message about climate change: “Your area is All Clear!”