Fighting ‘fire with fire’ grows in Eugene, Springfield

“We’ve excluded fire from ecology at our own detriment,” said Scott Polhamus, board president of the Willamette Ignition Network, an organization dedicated to training that supports responsibly prescribed and wildfire burns. 

Getting fire back on the landscape has been a challenge in a society that has grown wary of fire, fearing it could escape and become something worse. (Such escapes involve less than 1% of prescribed burns each year, according to the U.S. Forest Service.)

As a solution, the Willamette Ignition Network offers a course catalog that resembles something you’d find at a college. It starts with basic firefighter training and builds up to advanced classes covering the science of fire ecology, including how fuels, weather, and topography interact. All of it is guided by federally mandated standards set by the National Wildfire Coordinating Group.