Wash state new wildfire risk mapping

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https://www.opb.org/article/2025/07/07/ ... -risk-map/

"Fire officials with the Washington Department of Natural Resources recently held their first public meeting about a project to map wildfire risk in the state in Klickitat County.

The June 26 meeting marks the early stages of a process directed by the state legislature to gauge the risks and hazards wildfire poses in communities around Washington and to guide new codes for fire-resistant construction.

Klickitat County Commissioner Ron Ihrig said he joined the meeting to find out how much influence local residents will be able to have over the risk rating the maps give their communities.

“Certain areas, I agree, are safer than others. We have issues with high winds down the Columbia Gorge in certain areas. I understand that,” Ihrig said. “But we’d really like to see boots on the ground for decision making.”

A statewide hazard map will be used to guide fire-safe building codes for new and remodeled construction located in rural areas known as the wildland-urban interface. Those codes define ignition-resistant materials that should be used in roof, wall and deck construction. Reports have shown varying costs for those materials, including some being cheaper.

Separate county level risk maps are in the works that will be designed as a planning tool to show the vulnerability of individual structures and to supplement the statewide map. A 2024 law directed the Washington Department of Natural Resources to create both maps.

“(The Legislature’s) intent was that we would create these maps, we would define the hazard rating by low, moderate, high, very high, and the code would be applied to the high and very high,” said Angie Lane, assistant division manager with DNR’s wildland fire management division, who was at the Klickitat County meeting.

It came one day after a controversial wildfire mapping program in Oregon was unanimously repealed by lawmakers.

That state’s wildfire mapping program was rolled out in 2022 but became the target of intense criticism from residents and lawmakers in rural communities who said its hazard levels were inaccurate. They also said the map caused insurance premiums to spike and, in some cases, for homeowners to be dropped from their policies all together.

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Oregon’s map was designed by researchers at Oregon State University. As in Washington, the map was meant to guide new building codes. It also created requirements to reduce vegetation for properties in high fire-risk areas.

While Oregon’s map became a source of political division in the state legislature, some Democrats said the mapping program’s failure was related to a lack of detail applied to individual properties.

“Property owners said ‘Explain this to me.’ And I couldn’t. Nobody could,” said Oregon Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, the sponsor of the 2022 map legislation. “The OSU guys came down and walked properties with me and they couldn’t either.”

Oregon’s wildfire hazard maps ranked properties based on four criteria: climate, weather, topography and vegetation. It used a mathematical formula to create zones of low, medium and high hazard.

But, according to Golden, the map’s landscape level approach was unable to take local property variations into consideration. In one instance, he recalled visiting a property containing irrigated farmland that was assigned an elevated risk compared to its neighbors.

“Everything you were seeing looked low risk,” he said. It was one of many properties he visited that seemed to defy the risk levels they were given, but which the mapping team couldn’t explain.

“My experience tells me there’s no chance of success unless you give some weight to the specific characteristics of a property,” he said.

Oregon’s program banned insurers from using the state wildfire maps in making underwriting decisions and required them to give specific reasons for cancelling or increasing premiums.

What’s more, Golden and Lane said many insurers already have their own maps or analysis to determine a property’s risk from wildfires.

As Washington’s map is rolled out, the state insurance commissioner will have to decide how to prevent insurers from using the state’s information.

The Washington Department of Natural Resources is currently holding private meetings with a steering committee to create initial map designs. There will be a “robust” community input process in the fall, according to Lane.

The Klickitat County meeting happened at the request of the county’s board of commissioners. In the meantime, records about the creation of the maps are available on the DNR website.