Oregon Wildfire Managers Develop New Tactics for a Climate-Changed Fire Season

Oregon's 2025 wildfire season is forcing a rethinking of firefighting doctrine. Fire managers report that fires are now exhibiting behaviours — extreme rate of spread, overnight intensity that does not drop as historically expected, simultaneous ignition across multiple fronts — that were once rare enough to be treated as exceptions but have become the operating norm. The implicit model underpinning US wildfire response — that fires can be contained if enough resources are deployed quickly — is increasingly insufficient.

The core problem is that firefighting capacity was built for a different climate. Air tankers, crew deployment protocols, and incident command structures are optimised for a fire environment that no longer exists in western North America. Adapting requires not just new equipment but institutional change — rewriting training curricula, altering crew rotation rules designed for shorter fire seasons, and persuading insurers and policymakers to fund preventive prescribed burns rather than reactive suppression that is costlier per acre treated.

Oregon's fire managers are experimenting with managed wildfire — letting some remote fires burn under monitoring rather than committing resources to impossible containment — but this requires public acceptance of short-term smoke and risk in exchange for reduced catastrophic fire risk long-term. That political trade-off is one that most fire-facing states have not yet successfully navigated.