Chelan County, Washington has spent the past decade watching historic wildfires tear through its forests, orchards, and communities. Now local officials are pushing a prevention strategy that asks landowners to do something that sounds counterintuitive: set their land on fire themselves.
The Cascadia Conservation District, which serves Chelan County, is hiring an outreach contractor to help private landowners understand, plan, and actually carry out prescribed burns on their property. The work is funded through the Washington State Conservation Commission and the Washington Department of Natural Resources, both of which have been channeling state dollars into prescribed fire programs following a landmark 2021 law that committed $125 million per two-year budget cycle to forest health and wildfire response.
The urgency behind the effort is hard to overstate in this part of the state. The 2014 Carlton Complex was the largest wildfire in Washington history at the time. The 2015 Chelan Complex destroyed dozens of homes near the lake. The 2020 Labor Day fires added more damage. All of them burned through the same patchwork of national forest, private ranches, orchards, and tourist-area development that defines north-central Washington.
Source: NationGraph.
The core problem is that roughly half the at-risk landscape in the region sits on private land, and most of those landowners have never done a prescribed burn. Many don't know how to plan one, don't have liability coverage for it, and aren't sure where to start. Meanwhile, a century of fire suppression has left forests dangerously overgrown, and insurance carriers are beginning to pull back from high-risk zip codes across the state, giving landowners new financial pressure to take fire risk seriously.
Conservation districts like Cascadia have become a key link between state agency expertise and individual landowners, particularly in counties like Chelan where voluntary, neighbor-to-neighbor outreach tends to go further than top-down regulation. The goal isn't just awareness: the contractor will help develop actual burn projects that cross public and private property lines, the kind of landscape-scale work that fire prevention experts say is necessary to make a real dent in fuel loads.
The full request for qualifications is posted through Cascadia Conservation District, with contractor selection expected in early June and work beginning by mid-summer.
