Ninety percent of the West is under drought. Concerns of another bad fire year come as one farming community in Washington state has barely started cleaning up from a destructive fire last year.

Transcript

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

A fast-moving wildfire northwest of Los Angeles has been threatening thousands of homes. This would be unusual in a, quote, "normal fire season." But with climate change, it's now fire season all year round. Right now, 90% of the west is in severe to extreme drought. And as NPR's Kirk Siegler reports, the threat for major wildfires is again looming large, even as some communities are still cleaning up from last year's blazes.

KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: Along the picturesque, rolling wheat fields and pine-forested draws of eastern Washington's Palouse country, folks are saying it looks like mid-July, not the middle of May. This dry wind is blowing a lot this spring, bringing back trauma for people like Cindy LaMontagne, who lost her home in a wildfire here last Labor Day.

CINDY LAMONTAGNE: Just a watch-and-see - pray a lot.

SIEGLER: About 80% of all the homes and buildings in this little farming town, Malden, burned. Most of the couple hundred survivors were poor. Malden was a rare place around here where housing was still affordable. And like LaMontagne, they had little or no insurance. She spent the winter living in a travel trailer on her burned-out lot.

LAMONTAGNE: That was kind of touchy (laughter). Some of the heat went out and used electric. And like I said, surviving.

SIEGLER: Surviving with the threat of more wildfires just around the corner. And there are real concerns that Malden or what's left of it isn't ready. Scott Hokonson is on the town council here and is also the lead coordinator for the recovery.

SCOTT HOKONSON: It brings us close to tears because what if we don't have time to harden the town? What if we don't have time to make it ready?

SIEGLER: Eight months after the fire, most of the lots here have still not even been cleaned, including the one right next door to where Hokonson's house burned.

HOKONSON: As you can see, my neighbor has not tested or cleaned right adjacent to me. So we don't know if that has asbestos, silica, lead, other hazardous material.

SIEGLER: The story of Malden's delayed recovery is a tangle of economics and rural neglect but also politics. Last year, former President Trump refused to approve a routine disaster declaration for Malden because he was feuding with Washington's Democratic governor, Jay Inslee. So that federal aid didn't start arriving until after President Biden took office and signed the order.

HOKONSON: So yeah, we suffered from that. If its intent was to harm us, it was effective. It harmed us.

SIEGLER: The irony for Hokonson is that most of his neighbors on this burned-out dirt road were Trump supporters. This is conservative farming country. Whitman County is routinely the nation's top wheat-producing county. Wildfires happened here over the years - a spark from a tractor setting a pasture afire, a cigarette butt tossed out a car window. But last Labor Day and the winds that knocked a tree into a power line was something entirely different.

HOKONSON: Oh, I think that if you and I were adults 30 - 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, we'd say this isn't where forest fires happen.

SIEGLER: They do now. The Labor Day fire burned 15,000 acres in just a few hours, at one point chewing up the equivalent of 60 city blocks a minute. The nation's top fire managers warn Malden is the future.

GRANT BEEBE: We've got global climate change hitting us hard. This has been a generational thing coming on.

SIEGLER: At the National Interagency Fire Center in Idaho, Grant Beebe says you can draw a line at the Mississippi River, look to your left, and pretty much all the land is now vulnerable for catastrophic wildfires.

BEEBE: It's windy. It's droughty. It's super-dry. It's as dry as it should be in the summer right now. You know, that's not the first time this has happened, but I'll say that the years are stacking up. So year after year after year, we're seeing extreme conditions in some place.

SIEGLER: Last year, Beebe's agency ran at the top preparedness level for weeks, meaning that all available firefighting resources were deployed and taxed. Despite the pandemic, a record 32,000 firefighters were mobilized. Federal fire managers are basically planning for this to happen again, and they're hopeful that with vaccines, quarantining and other protocols can be relaxed some. They're also pleading with the public to be careful. Most of the destructive and deadly fires lately have been human-caused. And once they get away, they're impossible to control. So across the West, many first responders are just prioritizing evacuation planning.

(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO CHATTER)

SIEGLER: Bill Tensfeld is the emergency management director for Whitman County, Wash.

BILL TENSFELD: Oh, yeah, I think this was a definite eye-opener for eastern Washington - how easy it can happen.

SIEGLER: He says even if they had had a hundred more trucks available last Labor Day, they probably couldn't have saved Malden. It was a miracle no one died.

TENSFELD: I'm anticipating, and I'm gearing up for it to happen again. I don't want to sound like the Grim Reaper, but it got just as good a chance of this happening to any community in the Palouse.

SIEGLER: If not the rest of the West, too.

Kirk Siegler, NPR News, Malden, Wash.

(SOUNDBITE OF SUSS' "CHISHOLM TRAIL") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.