Why less land has burned in much of the West this year

Ahead of this year’s typical fire season, western states braced for the worst. Last year’s drawn-out heat waves and dry weather sparked numerous conflagrations in the region that put the country on its highest alert, and officials feared another round. But much of the West has not burned as expected.

Now, rain and colder weather could spell the end of high-risk conditions and the potential end of fire season for many of those states. A next round of storms is expected to move through the region beginning this weekend.

Devastating wildfires tore through Los Angeles to start the year, but since then, despite fast-moving flames in the Plains in spring, and a handful of notable blazes in the Western states this summer and fall, this year has seen about half the land burned compared to last year, particularly during the typical peak of fire season.

In Oregon alone, about 340,000 acres of land have burned this year compared to the approximately 1.9 million acres that burned across the state in 2024. And some of these Western states, which bear the brunt of fire season, mimicked the national trend as well; less of the United States burned so far this year, even with more fires nationwide.

Although in many ways a sigh of relief, the smaller amount of acreage burned tells only part of the story, state officials and experts said. Parts of the West experienced a high number of fires this year, which put a strain on fire resources even if they didn’t burn more land. And any breather of a season may also indicate extreme years are viewed as normal - particularly as fires become more destructive and deadly.

“After a decade of recurrent and rapidly escalating catastrophic wildfire losses … we have become inured to the occurrence of individual fires that burn thousands of structures and result in dozens of direct deaths,” said Daniel Swain, climate scientist at the California Institute for Water Resources. “Yet until around 2015, this essentially never happened in the era of modern firefighting in the United States.”

Some experts also said they worried that in the case of seasons deemed less severe, policymakers may then lower wildfire safety as a priority.

“When we have fire seasons that have less activity, and certainly less activity that’s affecting densely populated areas, it starts raising concerns about adaptation across the good years and the bad years,” said Amanda Stasiewicz, an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Oregon. “Other items take higher priority on the political agenda.”

Why less land burned - even as more fires started

Fast action to contain and extinguish flames, plus relatively lucky circumstances, may have taken the edge off a season primed for the worst as the typical summer-to-fall season reached its peak.

The year started with widespread drought, expectations of heat - and the feedback loop that ensures the two conditions continue to fuel one another. Those predictions largely came to pass, but well-timed rains near peak fire season may have helped blunt the worst.

And in some places, more fires sparked, even if they were shorter lived or smaller.

Oregon experienced almost 1,000 more wildfires this year. But Jessica Neujahr, a public affairs officer for the Oregon Department of Forestry, said the drop in how far they spread could be attributed to a faster initial response to newer sparks.

“Last year being the year that it was,” she said, “it kind of put this extra fire in our firefighters to get out and put these out as fast as possible.”

A sharp decline in land burned wasn’t the case for the whole region. Washington state’s fires have blazed through nearly as much land this year as last, and farther north, Canada saw its second-biggest wildfire year on record.

“It definitely wasn’t a slow fire season,” said Tim Sampson, deputy wildland fire division manager for Washington’s Department of Natural Resources, speaking last week from the Lower Sugarloaf Fire camp.

Well into the season, he was gearing up for a long day of work as the next day’s forecast called for strong winds.

Sampson said bigger fires don’t necessarily get public attention if they’re in rural areas.

“Unless you’re breathing the smoke or living in these communities, you don’t recognize a thousand-acre fire,” he said.

Often the most destructive and taxing fires are the ones that happen near communities.

For example, although the Bear Gulch Fire burning near Seattle was not the largest the state saw this year, it received a lot of local attention in part because of its proximity to people, Sampson said.

‘These fires are not going to go away’

The idea of a mild year has become relative. A year like 2025 so far would have been considered typical a decade or two ago.

Longer trends for the United States as a whole show that today’s fire season averages considerably more acreage burned, or about 7 million acres, than a season near the turn of the century, which averaged closer to 4 million acres, according to data from the National Interagency Coordination Center, which tracks U.S. fires.

While some fires continue to burn in the Pacific Northwest, a turn toward cool and rainy weather in the West has increasingly pushed the region away from fire season and toward the wet season. Additional rounds of rain and mountain snow are likely this week and probably into mid-month.

“Even in a warming climate - which is at this point unambiguously increasing the risk of high-intensity, fast-moving and destructive wildfires in most U.S. regions and globally - not every year is going to be an extreme fire year,” Swain said.

That’s one downside to a fire season with less land burned, and that seems milder, Sampson said. The public might forget the risk.

“We recognize that if we do have a slow fire season, it highlights the need to do education,” said Sampson. “These fires are not going to go away.”

While rain and colder weather is coming through, there’s still a risk, especially of human-caused fires, Neujahr said. People can become careless in wetter conditions even if the fuel on the ground is still dry. Eastern winds that blow through the region in the fall can help progress those man-made sparks.

“We are not done,” said Neujahr. “We are very much still in it.”

About half of Oregon remained under moderate fire danger as of Thursday.

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https://washingtonpost.com/documents/d8c1c9a7-c188-41b7-aab3-fa5f6ed259e2.pdf