Washington state's 3,300 acre Rowena Wildfire threatens 740 homes

KOIN 6: A wildfire burning dangerously close to the small Columbia River Gorge community of Rowena has spread to more than 3,300 acres, but by Friday evening, fire crews said it was finally looking up. “We have gone hard at this fire for all the right reasons,” said Oregon Department of Forestry Incident Commander John Buckman. “We turned the corner today and things are looking much better.”

Crews were able to bring the flames under 35% containment, but not before at least two homes were damaged and another destroyed, and the state spent nearly $2 million.

A total of 740 homes are currently threatened, with 143 homes under a Level III (Go!) evacuation notice, according to a late afternoon update, while 597 homes are on a Level 1 (Get Ready) evacuation warning.  Based on infrared imaging, the Oregon State Fire Marshal estimates the fire to be at 3,372 acres, but a new update is expected by morning.

...By Thursday night, the fire displaced residents of about 275 homes and had scorched over 2,600 acres with zero percent containment. Some of those residents were allowed back into their homes later in the day when the number of homes under a Level 3 evacuation dropped to 143 as the fire moved east. The marshal’s office at that time had estimated the cost of the fire at $937,000....

A generic wildfire shot, from California, public domain

Cooler temperatures, lighter winds could help firefighters with Washington wildfires

US News and World Report via AP: Cooler temperatures and lighter winds are forecast to descend on a wildfire-stricken Washington state, helping firefighters battle flames that have been growing unfettered for a week and have covered hundreds of square miles.

While Sunday's weather has slight improvements on the hot temperatures and gusty winds that have fueled the wildfires, the forecast for Monday and Tuesday calls for lighter winds and temperatures, said Spokane-based National Weather Service meteorologist Greg Koch. "Overall, it looks like the weather scenario is improving," Koch said.

Then on Wednesday a "vigorous" front is expected to cover Washington, bringing rain to much of the state. But it will also bring lighting, he added. "The benefits of the system are still up in the air," Koch said. "We may get some rain where we need it, but we may also experience some lighting that could cause some new ignitions."

Sunday's official estimate puts the wildfire burning in north-central Washington at more than 370 square miles. It measured 260 square miles on Friday. Okanogan County Sheriff Frank Rogers estimates that 150 homes have been destroyed, but suspects that number could be higher. His deputies haven't been able to search parts of the county where homes are spread miles apart. No serious injuries have been reported, Rogers said.

There are nearly 1,400 firefighters battling the flames, assisted by more than 100 fire engines, helicopters dropping buckets of water and planes spreading flame retardant...

An archival shot of a 1973 fire in Washington state

Before the Washington mudslide, warnings of the unthinkable

Darryl Fears in the Washington Post: ... At least 18 people have been confirmed dead, and up to 30 more are likely entombed in a thick gray muck, swallowed by the land, perhaps never to be seen again. For two tiny logging towns — Darrington’s population is 1,400 and Oso’s is 180 — the death on such a wide scale is unimaginable. Bogged down by relentless rain that continued Saturday, workers have failed to unearth many bodies, all but assuring that the landscape will be preserved in the short term as a mass graveyard.

...[S]ome are now questioning whether many of the homes should have been built at all in the valley below a hillside that commonly shifts, sending mud raining down about once a decade. At least four new homes have been built since the last major landslide muddied the valley eight years ago.

The Snohomish County officials who control land use permits asserted last week that there was no way of knowing a giant mudslide would ever happen there. In fact, the area was primed for just such an extraordinary event, according to geologist Daniel J. Miller, who twice surveyed the area for local Native American tribes who rely on the river’s health for fishing and for the Army Corps of Engineers. He wrote in his 1999 report that the Hazel Landslide, as the mountain is known, was constantly shifting, experiencing landslides and would one day suffer “a catastrophic failure.”

...An ancient glacier is jutting out of the mountain, making its flat plateau unstable, Miller said. The Stillaguamish River was eroding it from below. Rows of conifer trees that helped to mitigate erosion by sucking water through their roots and releasing it into the atmosphere were chopped down by loggers. Rain fell on the bald spots they left, drenching dirt and sand, making the mountain even more precarious.

March 2014 has been a ­record-breaker, the wettest in Seattle’s history. Miller realized his warning was not heeded when he visited the site following a major landslide in 2006 that did not do nearly as much harm. He could not believe what he saw.

...Charity Prueher, 41 and raised in Oso, said homeowners rarely mentioned the slides. When they did, the coursing mud was considered a small disruption, more of an annoyance than a major problem. “They’re so content with the beautiful place where they live, they don’t think anything would happen,” Prueher said....

Lisa Bishop and her dog, Cody, with Northwest Disaster Search Dogs, watch as a Washington National Guard helicopter flies over the debris field caused by the mudslide in Oso, Wash., March 27, 2014. US National Guard photo

Risk of Washington mudslide ‘unforeseen’? Warnings go back decades

Ken Armstrong, Mike Carter and Mike Baker in the Seattle Times: While a Snohomish County official said the area hit by the mudslide “was considered very safe,” the hillside’s history of slides dates back more than 60 years. One expert says he was shocked when homebuilding was permitted after a big 2006 slide.

Since the 1950s, geological reports on the hill that buckled during the weekend in Snohomish County have included pessimistic analyses and the occasional dire prediction. But no language seems more prescient than what appears in a 1999 report filed with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, warning of “the potential for a large catastrophic failure.”

That report was written by Daniel J. Miller and his wife, Lynne Rodgers Miller. When she saw the news of the mudslide Saturday, she knew right away where the land had given way. Her husband knew, too. “We’ve known it would happen at some point,” he told The Seattle Times on Monday. “We just didn’t know when.”

Daniel Miller, a geomorphologist, also documented the hill’s landslide conditions in a report written in 1997 for the Washington Department of Ecology and the Tulalip Tribes. He knows the hill’s history, having collected reports and memos from the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s and 1990s. He has a half-dozen manila folders stuffed with maps, slides, models and drawings, all telling the story of an unstable hillside that has defied efforts to shore it up.

That’s why he could not believe what he saw in 2006, when he returned to the hill within weeks of a landslide that crashed into and plugged the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River, creating a new channel that threatened homes on a street called Steelhead Drive. Instead of seeing homes being vacated, he saw carpenters building new ones. “Frankly, I was shocked that the county permitted any building across from the river,” he said. “We’ve known that it’s been failing,” he said of the hill. “It’s not unknown that this hazard exists.”...

US Airmen with the Washington National Guard in Oso on March 27, 2014, public domain

Mudslide death toll rises as bleak search continues

Heather Graf, Elizabeth Weise and John Bacon in USA Today:  More than 200 emergency responders and volunteers burrowed through tons of mud, crushed homes and twisted cars for a fifth day Wednesday in search for survivors and bodies buried in the mudslide that devastated the village of Oso.

Snohomish County Emergency Management Director John Pennington confirmed two more bodies were recovered and eight others located Tuesday, raising the death toll to 24. The grim discoveries and the knowledge that dozens of neighbors and friends remained missing darkened the mood of the search effort. The threat of flash floods or another landslide kept responders on edge.

Both Pennington and Snohomish County Fire District 21 Chief Travis Hots acknowledged the chance of finding survivors was small, but said the effort remained a rescue and recovery operation. "We haven't lost hope. There's a possibility that we could find somebody alive in some pocket area as the days go on," Hots said. "We are coming to the realization that may not be a possibility, but we are going full steam ahead."

Hots said about 200 responders used search dogs, heavy equipment and their bare hands Tuesday to dig through the debris field — once a community of a few dozen homes on the Stillaguamish River offering breathtaking views of hillsides and a bluff. On-and-off rain throughout the day created wet roads and dangerous conditions for searchers....

Photo of the Oso, Washington mudslide by the Washington State Patrol, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Wildfires rage in West, destroy 60 homes in Washington state

Jonathan Kaminsky in Reuters: Firefighters battled wildfires across the West on Tuesday, including a massive out-of-control blaze that has destroyed at least 60 homes and burned more than 28,000 acres between two national forests in Washington state.

Another 400 homes were evacuated in the rolling hills between the northwest Washington towns of Cle Elum and Ellensburg, at the eastern edge of the Cascade Mountains, prompting Governor Christine Gregoire to declare a state of emergency in two counties.

The massive Taylor Bridge Fire was among more than a dozen wildfires burning across the West, which is wilting under a heat wave that has sent temperatures into the triple digits. Together, the fires have burned some 500,000 acres across Idaho, Washington, Oregon and California.

Across the nation, wildfires have consumed roughly 6 million acres (2.4 million hectares) this year, above the 10-year average of 4.9 million acres, according to figures from the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.

Authorities said the Washington state fire was started on Monday afternoon by workers at a construction site east of Cle Elum, about 75 miles southeast of Seattle. "We don't know what the actual cause was. We have no indication it was intentional," said Nancy Jones, a spokeswoman for a state emergency response team....

An aerial view of Cle Elum Lake, shot by Joe Mabel, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Under a warming climate, Washington’s forests will lose stored carbon as area burned by wildfire increases

US Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station: Forests in the Pacific Northwest store more carbon than any other region in the United States, but our warming climate may undermine their storage potential.

A new study conducted by the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station and the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington has found that, by 2040, parts of Washington State could lose as much as a third of their carbon stores, as an increasing area of the state’s forests is projected to be burned by wildfire. The study—published in the July 2012 issue of the journal Ecological Applications—is the first to use statistical models and publicly available Forest Inventory and Analysis data to estimate the effects of a warming climate on carbon storage and fluxes on Washington’s forests.

“When considering the use of forests to store carbon, it will be critical to consider the increasing risk of wildfire,” said Crystal Raymond, a research biologist based at the station’s Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory and lead author of the study. “Especially in the West, where climate-induced changes in fire are expected to be a key agent of change.”

...To explore what effect climate-driven changes in wildfire might have on the ability of Washington’s forests to act as carbon sinks, Raymond and station research ecologist Don McKenzie used a novel approach. They combined published forest-inventory data, fire-history data, and statistical models of area burned to estimate historical and future carbon carrying capacity of three regions in Washington—the Western Cascades, the Eastern Cascades, and the Okanogan Highlands—based on potential forest productivity and projections of 21st century area burned.

“Forests on both the eastern and western slopes of the Cascade Range will lose carbon stored in live biomass because area burned across the state is expected to increase,” Raymond said. “Even small increases in area burned can have large consequences for carbon stored in living and dead biomass.”... 

A new PNW Research Station study explored how carbon dynamics in Washington State may be altered by more-frequent wildfires, triggered by a warming climate. The study looked at the effects of greater area burned on both live biomass and nonliving biomass, such as the dead standing trees and downed wood shown here. Photo by Tom Iraci, from the US Forest Service/PNW Research Station website

Puget Sound needs a plan for sea level rise

Political News.me: During an Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing, U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) highlighted the impacts that climate change and rising sea levels will have on Washington state’s infrastructure, economy, and first-response capability and discussed the need for smart adaptation planning.

A recent study projected that the potential costs to Washington state from climate change impacts would reach nearly $10 billion per year by 2020 and $16 billion per year by 2040. In the Puget Sound region, the sea level is projected to rise by six inches by 2050 – 13 inches by the end of the century. And due to potential ice melt from Greenland and Antarctica, catastrophic increases of up to four feet for the Puget Sound are even possible by the end of the century.

...“We just can’t sustain this kind of level of sea level rise without a plan. We need a plan,” Cantwell said during today’s hearing. “We are seeing the impacts of climate change right now on ocean acidification levels and how it’s affecting the shellfish industry in the Pacific Northwest so we’re really seeing economic impacts. …We have so much property in Puget Sound. We have something like $27 billion dollars worth of structures that could be impacted on these kinds of rising sea level issues.”...

Burton, on Vachon Island in Washington, shot by Joe Mabel, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Winds arrive in storm-weary Pacific Northwest

Manuel Valdes and Nigel Duara in the Seattle Times: Strong winds descended on the storm-weary Pacific Northwest and thousands of people remained without power Saturday after a winter storm left a tangle of fallen trees and damaged power lines. Around 195,000 customers remained without electricity, reported Puget Sound Energy, one of the region's largest utilities. That was down from a peak of more than 260,000 customers.

Wind gusts close to 50 mph arrived in much of the region, which could combine with the remaining snow to bring down more trees. Four snowmobilers were rescued from near-whiteout conditions in Todd Lake, west of Bend.

"It's a recipe for more down branches and potential power outages," said National Weather Service meteorologist Dennis D'Amico. "The good news is that we've had above freezing temperatures for over 24 hours. We're on our way to melting the snow."

In Oregon, worries about flooding and high winds subsided Saturday. Highways along the coast were closed for several hours as high water crept over roadways, but warnings of potential flooding in Benton County proved unfounded...

Des Moines, Washington seen from Point Robinson, Maury Island, Washington, shot by Joe Mabel, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Northwest US forest plan has unintended benefit – carbon sequestration

Science Daily: The Northwest Forest Plan enacted in 1993 was designed to conserve old-growth forests and protect species such as the northern spotted owl, but researchers conclude in a new study that it had another powerful and unintended consequence -- increased carbon sequestration on public lands.

When forest harvest levels fell 82 percent on public forest lands in the years after passage of this act, they became a significant carbon "sink" for the first time in decades, absorbing much more carbon from the atmosphere than they released. At the same time, private forest lands became close to carbon neutral. Carbon emission or sequestration is a key factor in global warming, and a concept now gaining wider interest is the role of forest lands in helping to address concerns about the greenhouse effect.

Researchers at Oregon State University and the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the USDA Forest Service created these assessments with a new system that incorporates satellite remote sensing and more accurately simulates ecological processes over broad areas. It considers such factors as the growth of trees, decomposition, fire emissions, climate variation and wood harvest.

"The original goals of the Northwest Forest Plan had nothing to do with the issue of carbon emissions, but now carbon sequestration is seen as an important ecosystem service," said David Turner, a professor in the OSU Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society.

"Forests provide many services, such as habitat protection, recreation, water purification, and wood production," he said. "Carbon sequestration has now been added to that list. And our approach can provide the kind of spatially and temporally explicit data that will help evaluate the potential trade-offs associated with management activities."...

Clearcut areas in the Northern Oregon Coast Range on the border of Washington and Yamhill counties. Shot by M.O. Stevens, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

After a three-decade hiatus, sea-level rise may return to the US west coast

Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego: The West Coast of North America has caught a break that has left sea level in the eastern North Pacific Ocean steady during the last few decades, but there is evidence that a change in wind patterns may be occurring that could cause coastal sea-level rise to accelerate beginning this decade. That is the conclusion of researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, who said that conditions dominated by cold surface waters along the West Coast could soon flip to an opposite state.

"There are indications that this is what might be happening right now," said Peter Bromirski, lead author of a study now in press in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans, published by the American Geophysical Union.

Global sea level rose during the 20th Century at a rate of about two millimeters (.08 inches) per year. That rate increased by 50% during the 1990s to a global rate of three millimeters (.12 inches) per year, an uptick frequently linked to global warming. Rising sea level has consequences for coastal development, beach erosion and wetlands inundation. Higher sea levels could cause increased damage to coastal communities and beaches, especially during coincident high tides, storm surges and extreme wave conditions.

….Scientists date the current phase of a Pacific Ocean climate cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) to the mid- to late-1970s. The current "warm" phase is characterized by the upward movement, or upwelling, of cold water toward the surface along the West Coast. Despite a few El Niño-induced surges in sea level during that time, the coastal sea level trend has mostly been steady.

… The authors write that the characteristics of wind stress variability over the eastern North Pacific "recently reached levels not observed since before the mid-1970s regime shift. This change in wind stress patterns may be foreshadowing a PDO regime shift, causing an associated persistent change ...that will result in a concomitant resumption of sea level rise along the U.S. West Coast to global or even higher rates."

In the map on the left, satellite altimetry sea-level height estimates over an 18-year period show upward trends in the western Pacific Ocean that are much larger than the global rise rate, but virtually no rise off the West Coast. (Right) Tide gauge data at Seattle, San Francisco and San Diego show sea level along the Pacific coast rising at about the global rate from 1930 to about 1980, but scant rise or even a lowering of sea level over the past three decades that is consistent with altimetry. Large interannual fluctuations in the trends are associated with El Niño. Image credit: AGU

Water supply in western Canada faces impact from international decisions

Judie Steves in the Kelowna Capital News (British Columbia): While the shorelines are dotted with beaches and resorts for those who love the recreational opportunities, to others, the Okanagan’s lakes are less things of beauty than conduits providing life-giving water to hundreds of thousands of people and millions of other living things—in two countries.

We’re at the top end of what is an enormous watershed, all feeding the Columbia River through Washington and Oregon in the U.S., before it dumps into the Pacific Ocean at Portland. And, in a couple of years, the orders governing water levels in the cross-border Osoyoos Lake in the southern part of the valley, must be renewed by the International Joint Commission. That decision will impact everyone in the Okanagan Basin.

If the current orders requiring that the lake levels remain between elevations of 911.5 feet and 909 feet are kept, there could be little change in how the new orders impact Central Okanagan residents. …However, if changes are made to consider not only lake level but the flows, there could be water losses to upstream users, particularly during drought years, which are predicted to be more likely as climate change impacts natural flows of water. And, that’s an issue that concerns the Okanagan Basin Water Board, which wrote to both the IJC boards in Canada and the U.S. and to Okanagan-Coquihalla MP Stockwell Day requesting that no such change be made in the orders.

The board was responding to a report by Washington State University researchers recommending a shift in water management policy from lake levels to flow requirements. “We believe this is a substantial shift from the status quo, and, despite our ongoing studies, there is still insufficient science to inform such a change—especially considering the high level of uncertainty about water availability in any given year,” wrote board chair Stu Wells.

…Climate change impacts are not normally taken into account by the IJC in making decisions on orders for trans-boundary waters, he said. People should be informed about the possible upstream impacts of changes in orders for the watershed’s trans-border waters, he added….

Osoyoos in British Columbia, shot by David Wise, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Recovery Act funds Washington stormwater projects worth $5.6 million

Environment News Service: Governor Chris Gregoire and the Washington state Department of Ecology have approved clean water projects in Olympia, Spokane, and Seattle's Ballard neighborhood worth a total of $5.6 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding. The funding will pay for low-impact development projects that provide enhanced stormwater treatment. These projects capture or slow stormwater runoff allowing it to infiltrate back into the ground.

The goal is to prevent polluted runoff from getting into downstream waters and drinking water. The projects will reduce flooding and sewer-stormwater overflows, and improve water quality for threatened and endangered salmon. Project proponents estimate the projects will support about 75 construction jobs. "Getting more jobs is a great bonus, but so is getting the clean water these projects provide for our state and for our salmon," said Governor Gregoire.

Polluted stormwater is the leading cause of urban water pollution in Washington state because water that goes into storm drains is not treated. Washington's capital city of Olympia will receive $3.67 million for enhanced treatment of stormwater runoff at Yauger Park. Half of the $3.67 million is a low-interest 20-year loan and half is forgivable principal loan, or money that does not need to be repaid.

….The project will increase stormwater storage at Yauger Park, reducing erosion from flooding. The project includes low impact development, a water quality treatment wetland, retention ponds, a 5,000 square foot rain garden, and swales. The city also will create a new parking lot using porous pavement.

The eastern Washington city of Spokane will receive $382,000 for its West Broadway SURGE (Spokane Urban Runoff Greenway Experiment) project. Half of the $382,000 is a low-interest 20-year loan and half is a forgivable principal loan, or money that does not need to be repaid.

…Seattle Public Utilities’ Ballard Green Streets project gets $1.54 million. Half of the $1.54 million is a low-interest 20-year loan and half is forgivable principal loan, or money that does not need to be repaid. Using this funding, the utility will install 10 blocks of swales to naturally detain and infiltrate stormwater. This Green Streets project will control runoff from 2.6 acres of hard surfaces, reducing sewer-storm overflows. The swales also will free up capacity in the combined sewer-storm system, further reducing pollution overflows….

Spokane Falls, from an 1888 illustration

High human impact ocean areas along US west coast revealed

National Science Foundation: Climate change, fishing and commercial shipping top the list of threats to the ocean off the West Coast of the United States. "Every single spot of the ocean along the West Coast," said Ben Halpern, a marine ecologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California at Santa Barbara, "is affected by 10 to 15 different human activities annually."

In a two-year study to document the way humans are affecting the oceans in this region, Halpern and colleagues overlaid data on the location and intensity of 25 human-derived sources of ecological stress, including climate change, commercial and recreational fishing, land-based sources of pollution and ocean-based commercial activities.

…"This important analysis of the geography and magnitude of land-based stressors should help focus attention on the hot-spots where coordinated management of land and ocean activities is needed," said Phillip Taylor, section head in NSF's Division of Ocean Sciences.

The lead scientists on the study conducted a similar analysis on a global scale; the results were published last year in Science. By refining the methods used in the global study and applying them at a regional scale, the scientists were able to test how well the results predicted regional ocean health.

"We found two remarkable and unexpected results in this research," said Halpern. "Ocean management needs to move beyond single-sector management and towards comprehensive ecosystem-based management if it is to be effective at protecting and sustaining ocean health. Also, the global results for this region were highly correlated with the regional results, suggesting that the global results can provide valuable guidance for regional efforts around the world."…

Alfred Bierstadt, California Coast