{"id":2124,"date":"2026-08-18T13:45:21","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T13:45:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=2124"},"modified":"2026-08-18T13:45:21","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T13:45:21","slug":"the-american-west-is-quietly-having-a-terrible-fire-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=2124","title":{"rendered":"The American West Is Quietly Having a Terrible Fire Season"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The summer of 2026 has been one of extraordinary fires. In Europe, they have burned hundreds of thousands of acres in France and Spain and destroyed homes across England; they killed 13 people in Spain last month, and an elderly couple in Greece this weekend. In Canada, fires have consumed an expanse of forestland larger than Belgium\u2014which is also battling its biggest recorded wildfire. In the United States, about 7.2 million acres have burned, the largest year-to-date area in the past decade and nearly double what it was at this time last year, according to data from the National Interagency Coordination Center. Allison Rayburn, a program coordinator for the Oregon Department of Forestry, told me that in the eastern part of the state, \u201cyou can barely see the sun\u201d through the smoke: \u201cIt\u2019s just devastation, and miles and miles and miles of blackened landscapes.\u201d<\/p>\n

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In Europe, many of the fires have threatened populated areas, but in the U.S., much of the area burning in the West has been rural. Near the Oregon town of Jordan Valley, the Big Grass Fire has been burning since July 23 and is among the largest fires in the state\u2019s modern history; toward the end of last month, it hopped a canyon and crossed the border to Idaho, where the smoke from this and other fires made the air quality the worst in the country. The complex of fires in Spokane, Washington, flattened entire neighborhoods; three other wildfires 10 times its size are burning elsewhere in the state.<\/p>\n

If 2025 was a year of urban fire that destroyed large swaths of Los Angeles, 2026 is a year of rural fire, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources\u2019 research unit, told me. \u201cThis is an extraordinary fire season in the American West,\u201d Swain said. \u201cIt just hasn\u2019t been in California\u201d\u2014which usually accounts for much of the nation\u2019s fire activity and its media attention.<\/p>\n

Many of the biggest fires this year started because of back-to-back lightning strikes and have grown because of extreme heat, drought, and dry fuel left behind after an unusually warm winter. They\u2019ve destroyed grazing land and crops, killed livestock, and incinerated fruit that was just shy of harvest. Many of the ranchers and government employees I spoke with compared 2026 to Oregon\u2019s devastating fire season two years ago, when 1.9 million acres burned across the state; already this year, residents have lost hundreds of thousands more acres than that. When I spoke with Dave Upthegrove, Washington\u2019s commissioner of public lands, he was driving from the fires in Spokane to one near Walla Walla that was threatening the town\u2019s water supply; the week before, he\u2019d visited the burn area of the 150,000-acre Sinlahekin Fire. Firefighters there had used a road as a fire line, he said, and on one side of it, all was flat and black. On the other side, crops were wilting from the fire\u2019s heat.<\/p>\n

Because so many of the fires this year are burning on rugged terrain without many roads, the elite firefighters who rappel from helicopters and hike through miles of forest to reach a fire line have been in high demand, Upthegrove said. But these hotshot crews cannot hit every fire, and in many cases, ranchers are the first to get there. Silas Skinner, a sixth-generation cattle rancher, told me that when the Big Grass Fire broke out, three government trucks were there; the rest were rigs from the Jordan Valley Rangeland Fire Protection Association. RFPAs\u2014about 40 of which are spread across Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada\u2014are independent, volunteer firefighting nonprofits composed of local ranchers and farmers who are trained by state and federal agencies to help fill the firefighting gap in rural areas. Their equipment comes largely from military surplus\u2014literally, in some cases, bulldozers that didn\u2019t get sent to Vietnam, \u201cand some that did,\u201d Rayburn, who is one of the RFPAs\u2019 main contacts in the Oregon government, said. In the weeks since lightning struck and started the fire, Skinner and about 100 other volunteers have been using military trucks, outfitted with water tanks and sprayers, to help government agencies fight the Big Grass Fire. It is currently burning an expanse of sagebrush and juniper trees nearly the size of Luxembourg.<\/p>\n

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Federal agencies have also been sending in thousands of employees to fight the fires. But with so many fires burning simultaneously, government resources have been stretched thin and diverted to those in more populated places such as Spokane. The volunteer firefighters, then, have taken on more of a share of the work than they have in the past, they told me. (Both the Forest Service and Wildland Fire Service said that it\u2019s standard for RFPAs to take on more work during a fire season this active.) When I spoke with Morgan Kromm, a rancher and the secretary of the RFPA in Crane, Oregon, and Tom Doman, the association\u2019s chairman, they\u2019d just come off a 10-day stretch of back-to-back firefighting. They told me they\u2019d been working in 36-hour shifts, and when I asked where they\u2019d catch naps during those stretches\u2014in their trucks?\u2014Doman clarified: \u201cWe were not sleeping.\u201d The Crane RFPA has already handled 18 fires this year\u2014normally the total they\u2019d have seen by about October\u2014and \u201cwe still have 90 more days of fire season,\u201d Doman said.<\/p>\n

Fire seasons vary by region, but in general, they have been getting longer and less predictable. Both RFPAs and state officials told me that this has made it difficult to get resources when and where they\u2019re needed. Typically, Oregon enters into mutual-aid agreements with states in the Southwest and along the East Coast that have different fire seasons and can help one another out. But the whole country has been so dry that \u201cthey\u2019re busy with their own fires,\u201d Michael Curran, the chief of fire protection for the Oregon Department of Forestry, told me. RFPAs provide mutual aid to one another too, while members also try to manage their own ranches and farms alongside firefighting. \u201cYesterday, we were moving cows, and the fire was burning right above us,\u201d Skinner said. \u201cSo everybody kind of had an eyeball on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of his grazing land has already burned. Other ranchers have found that their cattle died in the fire. In Jordan Valley, community members have been donating hay to those whose land burned, so their cattle will have something to eat. Rayburn told me that since that terrible 2024 fire season, she has watched landowners \u201cfor two years rebuilding fences and reestablishing water holes and reestablishing their cattle herds.\u201d Now the fires are burning those same places\u2014land where families have lived for generations, and land upon which their livelihoods still depend.<\/p>\n

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More land has burned so far this year than in any year in the past decade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2123,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-planet"],"yoast_head":"\nThe American West Is Quietly Having a Terrible Fire Season - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=2124\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The American West Is Quietly Having a Terrible Fire Season - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"More land has burned so far this year than in any year in the past decade.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=2124\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-08-18T13:45:21+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=2124#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=2124\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"The American West Is Quietly Having a Terrible Fire Season\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-08-18T13:45:21+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=2124\"},\"wordCount\":1167,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=2124#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/08\\\/f74e3db060e1ca99bfedb7a4dd70d03f.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Planet\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=2124#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=2124\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=2124\",\"name\":\"The American West Is Quietly Having a Terrible Fire Season - 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