by SEATTLE – As the Pioneer Fire came within a mile and a half of the remote northern town of Stehekin, Washington, emergency management officials Sunday ran door to door asking residents to leave.
The evacuation warning was raised to the highest level.
“Boats are running,” said Rich Magnussen, emergency management specialist with Chelan County. “They are running twice a day to try to reach people who choose to leave.”
There weren’t many takers. Most residents remained in their homes, choosing to strengthen their defenses and support firefighters, rather than flee.
“We’ll do everything we can to get people out, but because of fire conditions, we can’t guarantee,” Magnussen added.
Stehekin is a tight-knit community on the shores of Lake Chelan, a deep, 50-mile lake that winds through the North Cascade Mountains — among the most rugged terrain in the U.S. No road connects Stehekin to the rest of the state. The only quick way out is by helicopter or boat.
“We really need those people to come down the river and get out of harm’s way,” said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee in a video address on Xurging residents to evacuate.
But by Wednesday afternoon, three days later, 90 of the 95 residents in the area decided to stay put, according to Magnussen, who said Washington residents have the legal right to stay and protect their homes during a wildfire.
Chelsea Courtney, a Stehekin resident and artist who works at the local pastry bakery, chose to stay.
“There are a lot of really independent people here who have a habit of being very resourceful, depending on their neighbors,” Courtney said. “People care passionately about this valley and the life they’ve made here and I don’t think we have complete trust in entities for the management choices that have occurred.”
Courtney said Stehekin residents appreciate the firefighters’ efforts, but also question why the fire couldn’t have been attacked more aggressively when it started in June. She also said there was an occasional breakdown in communication between fire managers and residents, and she doesn’t understand why more couldn’t be done in the colder months to manage the forest to better adapt to the changing climate.
Mistaya Johnston, a local paramedic and ranch resort owner, said: “There are a lot of people here who don’t exactly trust” and in such a selfish community, many people want to see it through when the stakes are out. so high.
“If our business is successful, we won’t get a paycheck anymore,” Johnston said.
Feelings like these are common during high pressure wildfires across the rural West. As intense wildfires and evacuations become more common, some residents are growing weary of upsetting their lives and becoming risk-averse — or more confident in their ability to manage themselves.
That means some people are determined to stay in their homes even when authorities say they should leave, especially when there are fissures of trust between communities and those who manage wildfires and emergency response.
“Especially in rural communities, we’re starting to see a lot more people deciding to stay and protect,” said Amanda Stasiewicz, an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Oregon who studies evacuation decisions. “There’s a lot of mistrust going on there.”
As fire behavior grows more intense due to climate change and overgrown forests, rural communities may become more suspicious as fire managers operate more conservatively than in the past.
“People were used to seeing fires that were attacked in different ways decades ago and now there’s a different reality,” Stasiewicz said. “Now, we are seeing fires acting more radically, making their own weather and being more unpredictable.”
This dynamic is playing out in rural communities elsewhere.
Some Northern California residents whose homes are threatened by the Park Fire – now more than 397,000 acres and the fourth largest in state history as of Friday morning – have similarly decided not to evacuate, the San Francisco reported Chronicle. One couple told the Chronicle they were desperate to evacuate after waiting 10 days to return home after the 2018 Camp Fire.
About 94 large fires are burning across the West, with more than 29,000 wildland firefighters working to suppress them, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Of those blazes, 28 have active evacuation orders.
“When it gets like this, it’s all hands on deck, and they’re running out of resources,” said Brad Bramlett, public information officer assigned to the Pioneer Fire.
The Pacific Northwest, in particular, is in the spotlight this summer with about 51 large fires burning in Oregon, Washington and Idaho. A hotter and drier than usual spring and summer took a toll on the landscape.
As of Friday morning, the Stehekin area was under a red flag warning for dangerous fire weather, according to the National Weather Service. The Pioneer fire has grown to more than 33,700 acres and is about 12% contained.
In most years, the fire season would have only just begun.
Stehekin’s full-time population is about 85, and its residents live small-town life to the extreme. The public resisted the telephone service in the early 2000s.
Surrounded by icy peaks and the clear waters of Lake Chelan, the town’s population swells in the summer, as tourists take 2.5-hour ferry rides to access the trailheads in North Cascades National Park that begin in Stehekin.
The Pioneer Fire started on June 8 and is slowly moving north. It’s burning in some of the most challenging terrain firefighters have to deal with in the US, with steep slopes, rocky outcrops and a few trails.
“As soon as I heard about it, it was, ‘OK, here we go,’” Courtney said. “We all know how dry the early spring was. It felt like the fire season was speeding up.”
Stehekin residents are planning and preparing, Courtney said, clearing brush near homes, building a floating dock in the bay and holding community meetings.
Tourists were forced to leave on July 25, when emergency officials raised the evacuation level to 2 out of 3.
Meanwhile, firefighters have flooded into Stehekin. More than 640 fire personnel are working on the fire, although not all of them are based in the town. Johnston said she and her team of six served about 200 meals a day to crews.
On Sunday, emergency officials asked everyone in town to leave.
Magnussen said emergency management officials can’t guarantee any kind of help, especially if the boat dock burns — “the only way out,” as he described it.
“When they choose to stay, they are doing so at their own risk,” he said.
Courtney said she recognizes that but is concerned that Stehekin leaving now may not be able to return for weeks, if not longer. She feels that her self-reliant community, filled with people who own boats and are used to working the land, has been willing to fight fire for some time now.
Several previous close calls have also hardened his demeanor towards fire. Courtney saw the 2015 Wolverine Fire, which burned more than 60,000 acres near Stehekin, and last month, she went with family and friends a few miles “down the lake” to save her uncle’s property after firefighters left.
“My tolerance has increased,” she said.
Stasiewicz said, based on her own focus groups, surveys and interviews, sentiments like Courtney’s are becoming more common in rural communities. Evacuation often comes at a steep financial cost, she said, and some rural residents worry their properties won’t be prioritized.
“Sometimes we can see that rural communities lose out compared to more developed areas. There’s this attitude, ‘Maybe we need to take care of ourselves,’” Stasiewicz said.
In addition, she said, longer fire seasons and more frequent burns are reducing people.
“If I’m told to evacuate every summer and they all lose, there’s this ‘crying wolf effect,'” Stasiewicz said. “You lose confidence in experts who say you need to evacuate.”
For the authorities, these trends mean that it is becoming increasingly difficult to convince people to leave. At the same time, fire managers are dealing with more dramatic fire behavior, which may lead to more conservative decisions – including issuing more frequent and widespread evacuation warnings.
In Stehekin, residents and firefighting crews have cut containment lines along the eastern edge of town and set up sprinkler systems that feed the lake.
Airplanes and helicopters are scooping water from Lake Chelan and dumping it on the fire.
Courtney said incident management teams are rotating shifts; the latter group was more communicative and proactive. She is helping to feed firefighters every day at the Stehekin Pastry Co.
Courtney said what lies ahead for Stehekin is the intensity of the fire, how well the containment line is and whether the wind pushes the fire into town.
And what if the fire comes to town?
“I’ve got a boat,” she said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
