‘As a whole industry, we’re watching what’s happening’: Maui wildfires serve as warning for Spokane-area firefighters

The Maui fires have served as a reminder to Spokane-area fire departments about the importance of protecting urban areas from wildfires.

At least 53 people died from the fire in Lahaina, Hawaii. It’s now 80% contained, according to a Thursday post on Maui County’s Facebook page.

High winds from Hurricane Dora caused the wildland fires to spread into town. More than 270 structures were damaged or destroyed, county officials said.

Spokane Fire Department spokesman Justin de Ruyter has a firefighter friend in Lahaina who’s married to another firefighter .

“They lost their house, lost her parents’ house,” de Ruyter said. “They lost the sailboat her dad built that she was born on. They lost all that.”

Departments across the county are trying to take the major disaster as a lesson to prevent it from happening elsewhere.

“It’s these types of events that happen that we’ll look back in history and try to study what we could do better,” said Ken Johnson, Spokane County Fire District 10 fire chief. “And so as a whole industry, you know, we’re watching what’s happening.”

The Spokane Valley Fire Department has regular on-the-job and classroom trainings for wildland fires, said Fire Information Officer Jeff Smetzler .

“We carry wildland hoses on every engine,” he said.

They will adjust their wildland response as their area continues to change.

“It’s an ongoing process,” Smetzler said. “It’s not a perfect plan. We’re always reviewing it.”

De Ruyter said fuel mitigation efforts to prevent wildfires are important for their department.

“We’re not going to be able to stop all the fires, but what we can do is look at the pockets of fuel,” de Ruyter said.

This year, the department hired a wildland resource planner, Nick Jeffries. He said they are ramping up these fuel mitigation efforts on city property.

“We’ve done over a hundred acres of fuel mitigation,” Jeffries said. “We’ve been basically clearing the forest of trees that are 8 inches and under, pruning trees up 8 to 10 feet for ladder purposes, and then chipping, masticating or exposing the material that we cut.”

That “creates a more resilient forest,” he said.

He said Spokane is very high-risk for an event like Lahaina’s.

“I think we have one of the highest risks in the state,” Jeffries said. “So the deal is that if we don’t mitigate risks, we’re guaranteed to set ourselves up for failure. If we do mitigate risks, there’s always still a risk of catastrophic wind events.”

In March, the U.S. Forest Service awarded the Spokane Fire Department a $1.5 million grant solely for treating land and preventing wildfires.

Jeffries said the department plans to treat 300 to 500 acres with fuel mitigation a year.

Treating the area around last week’s Sunset Hill fire is on the list. Jeffries said it was supposed to be worked on this spring but is delayed until fall.

“Hopefully in the future, if we get a fire in that same place, it’ll be much lower-intensity and won’t get up into the tops of the trees,” de Ruyter said.

Fires crowning trees is what shoots off embers, which can travel great distances in high winds.

A fire in Indian Canyon with the right wind conditions could send millions of embers into downtown Spokane, Jeffries said.

“At that point, there’s not a lot resources can do with a wind event like that,” he said. “You can overwhelm the amount of first responders we have pretty quickly in a wildfire.”

Still, he said fuel mitigation efforts are a step in the right direction.

“The Spokane Valley Fire Department as a whole extends deep regret and sorrow to everyone affected,” Smetzler said. “We hope they can get through it.”

Guy Gifford, community resiliency assistant division manager of the state Department of Natural Resources, said the damage serves as a reminder of the risk Washington faces.

“You know, hearing that, one of the things is we’re grieving for the people of Maui, you know, and the loss and devastation,” Gifford said. “The other thing is just those high winds that they’re experiencing, how big of a problem that is, not just for them, but also reminds me of the challenges we have in this state when we experienced those same windy events and wildfires. And so, it’s really just devastating to hear what they’re experiencing.”

The Pacific Northwest has its share of fires during the hot summer months. Towns in Washington have been devastated and destroyed.

“The biggest early one was the 1991 firestorm,” Gifford said. “Before that, we had the Excelsior Road Fire several years before that. A couple years ago, we had the Labor Day wind event that lost the town of Malden. It burned up and we lost many structures in the state during that wind event.”

Johnson felt a sense of deja vu when hearing about the fires in Maui.

“My first reaction was that it sounded very familiar from the fires that we have around this area,” he said.

Wildfires are not as common an occurrence for tropical areas like Maui.

“This area is prone to wildfire, so it’s something that we’re kind of used to seeing and, you know, that doesn’t make it any better or easier to deal with,” Johnson said. “It’s definitely surprising that a tropical island like that would have such a fast-moving wildland fire like that, but when hot, dry weather and winds are pushing it, I mean, even buildings can spread from building to building. So, you know, even a place like Maui is susceptible with enough lack of rain.”

A disaster as big as Lahaina’s leaves firefighters anxious for the people fighting the fires, members of the community and the area’s structures.

“Any destruction like this to firefighters always reminds us of why we serve the community, and at the same time, we have sympathy for both the first responders who respond to these fires, as well as those communities with their loss of lives and structures. That always just weighs heavy on our hearts when we hear about that,” Gifford said.