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 work in the right places and to work across those jurisdictional lines that are … man-made. The fire doesn’t see, the ecology doesn’t see that we put these lines on the landscape,” 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.”…