The Inlander39%
Spokane coalition brings firefighters, foresters, utilities and land groups together to target wildfire prevention work where its most needed 13%
By Samantha Wohlfeil11%
7/16/2026, 8:30:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 22 faulty reasoning types, including Optimism Bias, Overconfidence Bias, and Anchoring Bias, with Post Hoc (False Cause) as the most egregious example at 15.6% saturation with 179 hits. Analysis detected 1,238 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,145 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 30.1% and a BS Rank of 13% (17,393 of 19,908 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 87.40% of the article peer group.
After fires tore through Medical Lake and Elk in August 2023, killing two people and destroying hundreds of homes and buildings, community resilience staff in the Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR) brought firefighters, emergency managers and land organizations together to create the Spokane County Wildfire Mitigation Coalition.
The driving idea behind the coalition is to work together to better prevent devastating wildfires by partnering, sharing contacts and other resources to target tree thinning and other fuel mitigation work in the areas most susceptible to go up with the next spark.
“This coalition has really allowed us to leverage capacity within the county to be able to do more intentional work in the right locations,” says Jessica Walston, co-chair of the coalition and the assistant division manager for DNR’s Planning, Science and Monitoring Division.
“Having this regular meeting of partners in this space, we’re actually able to do more intentional work in the right locations.”
Originally started in spring 2024, the coalition includes nearly every fire district and department in the county (not all districts have forested land) as well as Avista, Inland Power and Light, representatives from DNR, multiple cities, Spokane County Emergency Management, Washington State Parks, various local parks departments, the Inland Northwest Land Conservancy and the Spokane Conservation District.
Other agencies are welcome, by invitation, to join the monthly coalition meetings, which are not open to the public but provide members a chance to update one another on their current fuel mitigation projects and resources they may need.
Working together, the members have been able to identify projects near each other that make sense to combine into larger tree thinning efforts, and can sometimes offer help with labor or equipment needed to complete the job.
During the coalition’s June 29 meeting at the Spokane Conservation District’s office next to the Scale House Market, members ran through the many thinning projects they were wrapping up before industrial fire precaution levels typically increase during the summer, ending most fuel reduction work for the season.
It was the last meeting before pausing at least for July in anticipation of fire season requiring members’ attention.
Walston and Mary-Ellen Early, fuels specialist with the service forestry program in DNR’s northeast region office, reminded members to submit final reports on their projects, including how many acres were treated, how the slash was dealt with, and other details such as which crews did the work.
“I think people are really good about getting work done on the ground but not necessarily documenting what happened,” Early later tells the Inlander.
“I created a standard for everyone in the coalition for how to present their projects.”
DNR also tracks fuel mitigation projects across the state via its Forest Health Tracker, which can help with research when teams are trying to understand fire behavior in treated vs. untreated areas in the aftermath of major burns, such as the recent Upriver Fire in Spokane County.
Firefighters who respond to such burns can also fill out a voluntary, anonymous survey, to explain how they saw fire behave in those areas, Walston says.
She and others are just starting the process of analyzing how an area of Camp Sekani that DNR treated a few years ago behaved during the Upriver Fire, and will share the results with coalition members later this year.
Nick Jeffries, the wildland resource planner for Spokane Fire Department, who also co-chairs the coalition, checked to see which departments still needed to submit requests for a combined grant application the coalition intends to submit when more funding from the U.S.
Forest Service’s Community Wildfire Defense Grant becomes available.
The coalition intends to request enough funding to hire a forester who could plan and implement fuel mitigation projects for smaller districts in the county that don’t have someone like Jeffries on staff.
“Right off the bat, I feel like we need more asks for the coalition asks, especially now that we know we have a person in play,” Jeffries said during the meeting.
“I personally think that if you’re asking for a position for CWDG for the coalition, you need to ask for at least $5- or $8 million, you need to have it big, because that person’s going to need some projects to put on the ground for the next five years.”
Individual agencies in the coalition also plan to submit their own separate requests for that grant, but together, the regional collaboration should help Spokane County score higher, Early says.
Each spring and fall (and sometimes winter if, as it did recently, mild weather permits), foresters work on hundreds of fuel reduction projects in Spokane County, removing trees that are 8 inches in diameter or smaller, clearing shrubs and other plants in overgrown understories, and removing low branches from the bottom 10 feet of tree trunks.
Trained foresters also look up to see where the overstory canopy connections may need to be broken.
DNR offers financial assistance that can help private landowners hire contractors to complete these projects to reduce vulnerability to wildfire.
Over the last five years, DNR’s northeast office tracked an average of 324 such fuel mitigation projects per year in Spokane County, representing roughly 1,800 acres treated each year.
These projects received up to a 50/50 cost match from DNR (for a handful of underserved private landowners, it was even more).
Meanwhile, Spokane County Wildfire Mitigation Coalition member agencies, some of which manage huge swaths of public land, have partnered on more than 20 other projects to treat about 1,700 acres in the county over the last two years.
“The coalition just changed the game in my opinion for fuels reduction in Spokane County,” Early says.
“I’m not seeing this level of coordination in any other county I’m working with.”
DNR’s Steve Harris, assistant northeast region manager, agrees that of the six northeast region counties — Spokane, Stevens, Pend Oreille, Ferry, Okanogan and parts of Lincoln — the coalition makes Spokane County by far the most organized.
“Where I come in a lot of times is, we seek funding to sponsor projects.
… We tend to rent the chipper, we have the crews, we bring the tools to the table,” Harris says.
“And the collaborators, like our fire departments, they know where the problem areas are, they have the connections within the community.
… It’s just about working together.”
Spending maybe $2,000 an acre to treat the land now can help prevent spending $10,000 an acre or more to respond to a fire there, Harris explains.
“There’s an untold number of potential disasters averted from the work that we do,” Harris says.
“It keeps the fires on the ground where our firefighters can fight ’em effectively, and if we keep a fire small, we save unknown millions of dollars.”
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.