The Hagen Fire, which started a month ago, continues to burn on the edge of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. The tribes have declared a public health emergency because of the poor air quality from wildfire smoke.
On top of that, much of the area is in a severe drought.
Kimberly Hughes is the emergency management coordinator for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. She joins us to talk about how the tribes prepare for and manage these crises.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller coming to you all this week from Hermiston in Northeastern Oregon. A huge thanks to the good folks here at the beautiful new Hermiston Public Library for hosting us. We start this week with the Hagen fire which started a month ago, about 50 miles from here, and continues to burn on the edge of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. The tribe declared a state of emergency about three weeks ago because of the fire and pervasive wildfire smoke. Kimberly Hughes is the emergency management coordinator for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, and she joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Kimberly Hughes: Well, thanks for having me.
Miller: What’s the latest on the Hagen Fire?
Hughes: Oh, it’s still burning. We’re about just under 57,000 acres, and that’s pretty significant for something in our area. They are holding about a 14% containment, which, with a lot of the weather events that we’ve had, really speaks volumes of the people that are working those lines, night and day, they’re not stopping. It’s continuous work around the clock. We’re 31 days into it, so we’ve gone through several different incident management teams, which are beneficial. I mean, they keep us being able to do our day-to-day operations and keep fighting the fire so that we can focus on our community.
Miller: They cycle in and out, but you’re always the emergency management coordinator.
Hughes: Yes.
Miller: Have you had any days off in the last month and a half?
Hughes: I’ve had a few hours off. So, the fire season for us has been very unusual and very active. We’ve had some smaller fires, but July 4 really kicked off one of our big ones. And just keeping in contact and working with our county partners, our federal partners, technically, not since July 4 I’ve had a day off.
Miller: Really, just basically straight for a month and a half at this point.
Hughes: Yeah, and it’s wonderful communication. I mean, it’s just meetings and touching bases and everything else, but it keeps us involved and up to date on what’s going on.
Miller: I want to hear more about that coordination in just a second. It’s not always the easiest when you’re dealing with different governments, different parts of local, state, federal, sovereign nation governments, but to go back just to the fire itself, do you still have people on the reservation who are under Level 3 go now evacuation orders?
Hughes: We do. We have about a dozen homes still in Level 3. We had a slop over that happened over last weekend, and it was right above the homes that we have in the Level 3s. So they came up with several plans to essentially try to make sure that it didn’t come down to those homes, and we were also at the point of probably having to go back up on some evacuation levels if those plans didn’t work out, but luckily, like I said, after like tireless repeat work those guys did day in and day out, it was wonderful, and they were able to really hold it and keep it in Plan B. We made it to Plan B.
Miller: Has the fire threatened or destroyed culturally significant areas already?
Hughes: We’ve worked with a lot of our state fire marshals, we have what is BIA legacy, which is the U.S. Wildland Fire Services, and with what we call a THPO, which is our Tribal Historical Preservation Officer. They identify all of these areas as they’re making their plans going forward, and they will try to mitigate as much area around it without disturbing it to try to preserve it. If something does happen, we let nature take its course, but they really do try to get there and mitigate all of that before.
Miller: People on the west side of the Cascades may not have a real sense just for how destructive this fire season has been. On the west side, it’s largely been smoke, and then only when the wind shifted, going westward. It’s been very different on this side of the Cascades. Just in the big picture, can you give us a sense for what it’s been like here?
Hughes: We’ve had not so much rain as we typically get, but at the end of our season, we got a really good harsh downpour, and it brought a lot of that vegetation, dead vegetation and everything, down, so in our canyons and everything, we’ve been dealing with a lot of thick brush. And with the fire being in that area, what happens is, it’s all fuel driven.
We’ve been very fortunate to only have a few wind impacts, but a lot of the time, this fuel is just there, it wants to burn and when it cools down… It gets nice and hot, and then when the day comes up and the air clears up a little bit, and it gives it more of a weather to move with it, then it rushes up, because it’s already heated everything around it. So it’s been slow, but there’s so much fuel that it just wants to keep burning.
Miller: The board of trustees of the tribe declared a state of emergency almost four weeks ago, saying that local resources were at capacity and that you couldn’t handle additional fire threats. How much support have you gotten from state and federal partners?
Hughes: We were lucky enough that a conflagration was called, and Oregon State Fire Marshals sent in a task force. At that time, our fire defense board had pulled together a task force to try to get as many homes as they could defensible, but when the OSFM was able to come in on the conflagration, that allowed more materials and equipment to come in. I mean, don’t quote me, but I want to say there’s like 500 miles of hose in all of the homes and structures that they’ve laid to protect. And so that has been so crucial to making sure that those homes are protected on reservation and just above the reservation up there where the fire literally came to their back door.
Miller: I wanna go back to what you were saying earlier. How would you describe your working relationship with local, state, and federal partners as a sovereign nation?
Hughes: Most tribes don’t have law enforcement and fire departments, and we’re lucky enough that we do. Our fire department has been part of the Tri-County mutual aid agreement, and that gives us really good partnership. We’re able to not only assist people, but they also come in and assist us in that agreement. And once that agreement starts to get exhausted, then we have the Oregon State Fire Marshals will come in and assess and say like, we were meeting this criteria. And we have what is BIA legacy, U.S. Wildland Fire Services, we have one of their offices stationed with us, and they’re able to bring in teams as well. And so those have beautifully been built through the years, and I think it’s still going very strong and is proven in one of our worst fire seasons to help us tremendously.
Miller: In addition to being at capacity in terms of local firefighting resources, the emergency declaration included a public health emergency from wildfire smoke. What has smoke been like for the last month and a half?
Hughes: When we declared, we focused on what our community lifelines are, and one of them is sheltering their health, so we’ve made sure that we’ve been able to take care of tribal members if they want to evacuate and feel comfortable. And then, of course, people that want to stay in place stay home, the air quality has been just horrendous. I mean, we’ve hit 3-400, and we have families that live in Athena and Weston, and they’ve been hitting over 1,000…
Miller: AQI.
Hughes: Yeah, on some of the days. And so trying to get them to be able to get equipment in there to help scrub the air that’s in the homes, trying to get them to understand what is the best way to keep your home sealed up, or at least maybe go somewhere that can have better air quality.
Miller: How is that communication working?
Hughes: Communication is always a barrier no matter what happens, and we have a really good communication department and they do a lot of social media. The fire incident command team itself has a line that you can call 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., and they’ll distribute our information as well if people call, and get live updates of the fire. We try to keep up as much information as possible, but if anything that happens, communication is always a barrier to try to get all age groups. And we’re such a rural area, not everybody has social media or internet, so we try to get as much information and different avenues out as possible.
Miller: What does the forecast look, fire-wise, right now? What does it look like?
Hughes: Tomorrow we have another wind event coming in and we’re kind of watching that. These last few rains, they had several lightning strikes that happened over the weekend, and I think in our area our fire chief said that there was about 18 indications of possible heat signatures from those. As far as in establishing, we could find out in a few days they did not establish at all…
Miller: Meaning, did those lightning strikes cause new fires or not? The land is so big that you can’t know immediately if there are new fires or not.
Hughes: Yeah, the terrain is pretty dense, so until the heat signature builds a little bit more. But some of the weather helped us, and some of it really gave the guys a run for their money. All in all, for as much as they’re dealing with, they’re doing a phenomenal job and they’re getting more control over it every day that they keep going at it. So we do see the positive as things keep improving. And we keep looking at the other fires in Oregon, because even with ours starting to improve more, we still have all of their air quality and the smoke from theirs impacting our air quality.
Miller: How much are you already thinking about recovery now, or thinking about post-fire? Can you do that now, or is it just fully focused on the crisis at hand?
Hughes: So, technically, we think about it the moment we start working on an incident. We have to think about, what are the immediate impacts? And then, what is it gonna look like as those impacts start to calm down and we can start getting people back into their homes or at least getting better air quality, so that we can get everybody back in their normal day-to-day routines.
Miller: What are the ways that you think this could affect people on the reservation in the medium or longer term? I asked this because when we talked to folks in Warm Springs, they talked about a number of effects that could be lasting, in terms of water quality, in terms of access to logging, economic development – there are a lot of issues that could be serious for months or years to come, even as they were still talking about the fire itself.
Hughes: One of the things we’ve been looking at is, so far these three fires, the larger ones have really impacted some of our creeks. The burn scars can cause the water to run down faster, so we’ve been looking at what we can do ahead of time to start mitigating some of those water flows as a temporary kind of fix, but at the same time not impacting any type of fish habitat or anything. So it’s a delicate balance.
And then we have to worry about some of that goes with working with our partners, like the railroad when it comes to culverts, our road department – some of our roads are county roads, so then working with the county, as far as, the culverts are good. And so we’ve been looking at a lot of that, and I feel community-wise, that’s going to be a greater impact. And then we have a lot of reseeding that we have to do after all the dozer lines and start bringing back some of that habitat. And some of the people that have significantly moved out and moved a lot of things around, they have to go back and start reorganizing. We have been pretty lucky as far as some of the areas and it’s minimal impact to structures, but regardless, people are already looking at how to reorganize their land for a next fire.
Miller: You mentioned reseeding. Later this week, we’re gonna visit a tribal nursery to hear about native plants. So that’s a conversation folks can look forward to on Wednesday. Kimberly Hughes, thanks very much.
Kimberly Hughes is the emergency management coordinator for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.
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