THE GORGE — One way to mark the start of fire season is when local fire officials declare local burn bans. At this point, outdoor debris burning is banned in most Gorge communities:
• Wasco County banned residential burning, including in barrels, and fireworks as of May 8.
• Hood River County banned outdoor burning as of May 15.
• Klickitat County has three fire zones; open outdoor burning is banned in all three as of June 1.
• Skamania County has banned debris burning in the east side of the county (Cook, Mill-A, Willard and Underwood) as of June 1.
But how do local officials decide when it’s time to call it quits on outdoor burning, whether a “debris fire” to get rid of a brush or slash pile of yard trimmings or downed trees, or a recreational campfire to sit around and gaze at dancing flames or toast marshmallows?
We asked Arnold Bell. Bell has been Fire Marshal for Skamania County since 2023, after two years as deputy. (His other title is Building Official, meaning he’s in charge of making sure all building codes are followed, not just those related to fire.)
Skamania County code bans debris fires from July 1 through Sept. 30. Bell’s challenge is to figure out, each year, whether a burn ban should start earlier or run later than that.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Uplift Local (UL): How exactly do you monitor wildfire conditions, before a wildfire breaks out?
Skamania County Fire Marshal Arnold Bell: The former county fire marshal had a consortium of other county fire marshals within the region. They talked about conditions in different counties, there was a Department of Natural Resources representative, and they tried to make a decision that was consistent throughout the counties. With some of the wildfires that we’ve had in the recent past, there was a lot of emotion around whether or not we should be banning [debris burning] sooner, or banning recreational fires. We were receiving a lot of calls. So I worked with the DNR representative at that time to develop a metric so I could monitor the situation for our county specifically. And through several iterations we came up with what I have now.
UL: You mentioned the public getting emotional. Did the conversations among officials also get emotional?
Bell: I don’t think the county officials ever got emotional about it. They deferred to the fire marshal at the time, and fortunately enough, it all worked out. I mean, we have had fires, but it wasn’t for a lack of awareness. The Tunnel Five fire was caused by the railroad. Those are beyond our control. But the emotion was coming from the public over their legitimate concerns about their homes and their communities burning up. And when emotion starts to play into the decision making, that’s just not good decision making. You need to be able to have something that you can say, okay, this makes sense, and this is what we’re doing. And the metric, if you will, is kind of a working, living, breathing thing.
UL: Can you walk me through the metric?
Bell: I have five different data sets that I check every day. One is the hot, dry, windy index that comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, specific to our latitude and longitude. I use the NOAA fire weather discussion page for the temperature and the relative humidity. I use the Windfinder page for what the average wind speed is going to be, and the wind gusts. If we get an east wind blowing 30 miles an hour, we’re staying away from burning. And I use two different sites for the percentage of moisture that’s in down and dead fuels.
All of my data points are one through five. One is good, five is bad. Temperature, it’s a five if it’s over 95 degrees. Wind it’s a five if it’s blowing 25 miles an hour or more, and it’s a one if it’s less than 10 miles an hour. So I put all that into the metric and come up with a number. I have a graph — a one is blue, then it fades into a green, yellow, and into red.
Later in the conversation, Bell explained that he also considers conditions such as the preparedness of Northwest and national wildfire fighting teams, and where firefighters are currently deployed. “Just to keep track of resources, in case we do have something that gets out of control,” he said. “That’s always in the back of my mind.”
UL: Would a burn ban potentially change? Like if it rained, would you open up outdoor burning for a day or two?
Bell: No, no. Way back when they used to do that a little bit and it got so confusing that people didn’t know when they could burn and when they couldn’t burn. So debris burning will be shut down until I open it back up in the fall. I will go back and forth on recreational burn bans, but I have to have some sort of significant weather change in order for that to happen. A campfire is three or four pieces of wood. A brush pile, that’s a lot bigger, and that’s more susceptible to get out of control. So we just shut it down, and we haven’t got any pushback about that. Everybody in the county is pretty solid with that.
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Read full notes from the Skamania County Board of Commissioners’ May 19 meeting, where tracking fire conditions was mentioned, by Gorge Documenter Linda Zeigenfuss at www.columbia-gorge.documenters.org.
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Emily Harris is a co-founder and Uplift Local’s Community Journalism Director, overseeing the local newsroom network and the Documenters program.
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