WENATCHEE, Wash. — The Biden administration is removing more trees from central Washington forests as part of its strategy to prevent wildfires on public lands from exploding through nearby cities and towns.
Officials are targeting national forests, state and private lands across four counties for its forest thinning initiative. This includes six high-risk fire sheds (Twisp, Chiwaukum, Wenatchee, Leavenworth, Cle Elum, and American River) across 2.45 million acres (1.35 million acres of Forest Service lands, 1.1 million acres non-Forest Service lands).
After thinning the forests, officials expect wildfire exposure and smoke impacts to be reduced in Wenatchee, Leavenworth, Yakima, Chelan, Naches, Cle Elum, Winthrop, and other smaller communities adjacent to the forest.
Over a three-year period, from 2022-2024, this project is estimated to cost $102.6 million to treat 124,000 acres, according to official estimates. Government officials expect the forest thinning project in Washington to be completed by 2032.
The Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest is a focus of these efforts because six communities in the top 10 highest risks to wildfire exposure are near these central Washington forests. According to officials, more than 3.5 million people visit these areas each year as threats from wildfires, evacuations and smoke impacts have become a part of life for the surrounding communities.
Key to the government's strategy is addressing forest patches where computer simulations show wildfire could quickly spread to inhabited areas. Experts say the scale of spending is unprecedented and millions of acres have been through environmental review and are ready for work.
Mixed early results underscore the challenge of reversing decades of lax forest management and aggressive fire suppression that allowed many woodlands to become tinderboxes. Federal land managers in the program's first year fell behind on several of their priority forests for thinning even as they exceeded goals elsewhere.
The administration's multi-billion dollar effort includes 21 “priority landscapes” in 10 Western states where climate change, drought and disease have killed many trees and stands are primed to burn.
What is forest thinning?
By logging and using prescribed fires to remove smaller trees and low-lying vegetation, officials hope to lessen the amount of fuel that's available to burn. The idea is to reduce the intensity of fires so they don't rage out of control and destroy inhabited areas.
It's a simple concept, but putting it into practice is complicated by environmental concerns such as preserving older trees and not logging in wilderness areas, a shortage of workers trained to do the thinning and the sheer magnitude of the task. And areas thinned will likely need maintenance work in the future — making it hard to keep up with the rapid changes happening to forests as the world heats up.