A swath of eastern Washington just scorched by highly destructive wildfires is exempt from a new, fire-resistant state building code that will take effect in a few months for at-risk areas, according to a POLITICO analysis.
A draft state wildfire map shows that the area where more than 900 buildings were recently destroyed or damaged and 65,000 residents evacuated is outside high-risk zones that will be subject to protective building standards.
The exclusion of the devastated area — and almost all of surrounding Spokane County — raises fears that Washington’s novel effort to minimize fire damage underestimates the state’s fire danger. The three adjacent Spokane wildfires that started Aug. 1 were among the most destructive in Washington history and have cost more than $30 million to suppress.
“They’re not as useful as they could be,” said Dave Kokot, a former president of the Washington State Association of Fire Marshals who has advised on the map development.
The map understates wildfire risk in places such as a section of Spokane County that was heavily burned this month and has experienced several large wildfires yet has a “moderate” wildfire risk, Kotok said.
Only 1.5 percent of Spokane County is “high risk” despite the recent wildfires that burned 10,000 acres, the draft Washington Department of Natural Resources map shows. Overall, roughly 25 percent of Washington’s land area is high-risk and would be covered by fire-resilient building codes.
Weather experts are concerned that the map ignores global warming, which is making forested areas drier and more flammable — and, they say, will increase wildfire risk in some areas exempted from a state fire-resistant building code.
“If these maps are supposed to be used for long-term planning purposes, including structures that are designed to be there for a while, then I think it behooves folks to realize that climate change is occurring and it’s going to continue,” former Washington state climatologist Nick Bond said.
Washington state officials say they designed the map with the best scientific information available. They acknowledge that the disaster in Spokane has exposed the limitations of wildfire and other hazard maps, which are notoriously difficult to draw and unreliable.
Federal flood maps, for instance, are in some cases decades old and do not reflect changes such as new developments that have increased flooding. When Hurricane Harvey inundated southeast Texas in 2017, nearly 70 percent of the flooded homes were outside the government’s mapped flood-hazard areas.
Brett Anderson, deputy chief of the Spokane Valley Fire Department, said Washington’s draft wildfire map is “complex and may not reflect fuels and fire potential completely accurately.”
“We have to start somewhere, and this important first step isn’t perfect but very much needed,” Anderson said.
Wildfire hazard maps are particularly challenging because they have to incorporate atmospheric and ground conditions — and human behavior. Many blazes are ignited by human actions such as leaving campfires burning, carelessly tossing cigarette butts and arson. Police have charged a man with intentionally starting one of the three Spokane wildfires that burned this month.
The Washington map accounts for human actions by incorporating their historic probability. But human unpredictability makes it harder to calculate the likelihood of wildfire striking any location — and impossible to have predicted the arson in Spokane.
“This is something that I’ve thought a lot about in the last couple of weeks just due to the tragedy in that area,” Washington state wildfire meteorologist Matthew Dehr said at a public meeting Wednesday. Dehr is helping lead the mapping project.
“There’s no way for us to model [that] an arsonist is going to start a fire in a very unfortunate location. There are challenges to this that we just are not going to be able to catch,” Dehr added.
A meeting participant from the Seattle area said western Washington residents worry that fire resilience in low-risk areas may become a “low priority for a lot of our city and county planners.” Another attendee expressed concern that insurers might increase rates in areas without fire-resilient building codes.
Some wildfire-safety groups haven’t closely reviewed the map. Spokane Conservation District spokesperson Kohl LeRoy said the organization is helping communities damaged by the Spokane County wildfires and expects the map to “accurately reflect the severity of fire risk across Washington.”
Washington’s attempt to map wildfire-prone areas and require a fire-resilient building code has been beset by controversy for years.
A 2024 state law required development of the wildfire map and for risky areas to follow a fire-resistant building code, which requires flame-resistant construction materials and other conditions for new construction in areas bordering natural landscapes with severe wildfire danger. The Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, released a draft map that it can update in response to feedback before finalizing by January. Any area classified with a “high” or “very high” hazard will be required to follow the building code.
The law was enacted after backlash over an earlier legislative effort, which sought to map any area next to natural landscapes regardless of fire risk and set stronger building codes in the areas, called wildland-urban interface, or WUI. Developers and municipalities said the WUI was too extensive and compliance with the building code was too expensive, prompting the Washington Legislature to have the stricter building regulations apply only to high-risk areas.
The regulations, based on an international model devised by the nonprofit International Code Council, will apply to new construction and some substantial rebuilding projects.
DNR scientists designed the map using data on fire conditions in Washington over the past 30 years, which excludes climate change projections that would show areas where wildfire is likely to increase.
Dehr, the state meteorologist, said the DNR must “be able to justify everything that we’re putting on these maps” — and research is insufficient to account for how the wildfire environment will change.
“We just don’t have the hard data to back up what that would look like,” Dehr said. “So we don’t want to base the regulations around that. We want to base the regulations around what we know is happening over the last 10 to 20 years.”
DNR plans to update the hazard map every three years and could incorporate new science.
University of Washington fire expert Brian Harvey says in Washington “it really is a matter of when, not if many areas will likely burn.”
Sean McMinn contributed to this report.
