Earlier this month, while crews worked fires across the Pacific Northwest and a quarter of Spokane evacuated, people were placing bets on how much would burn.

Not metaphorically. On online prediction market platforms, you can buy a “contract” that pays out based on how long a fire lasts, how fast it grows or how many structures it takes.

During the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles last year, when 31 people died and more than 16,000 structures burned, over $1.2 million changed hands. One new platform’s tagline: “You can’t predict fire, but you can trade on it.”

On Aug. 3, Sen. Jeff Merkley and eight colleagues, including Sen. Ron Wyden, asked the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to shut it down. Their letter names the reason: fire officials warn that when money rides on how big a fire gets, someone will be tempted to light one.

Anyone who has spent a summer here keeps a go-bag by the door. We know how quickly a single spark can upend our lives. That an outsider would cash in on a fire tearing this community apart is obscene. That one of our own might profit from it is unimaginable.

There is a quieter problem. Incident commanders, dispatchers and utility crews know containment lines and structure counts hours before the rest of us. Turn that into a tradable asset, and you build an insider-trading market on top of an emergency response. Our firefighters should never work a line while anyone profits off what they know.

Even the industry concedes it. Kalshi, one of the largest regulated platforms, refuses to list wildfire contracts because they “create perverse incentives.” When a company turns down money on principle, regulators should notice.

The commission owes the senators a formal response by today. But it proposes only a case-by-case review, which would be slow enough that a fire market can list, trade and settle before anyone rules on it. And what one commission writes, the next can erase.

Federal law currently lets regulators bar event contracts in five categories: unlawful activity, terrorism, assassination, war and gaming. Wildfires are not among them. A bill adding a sixth, “natural disaster or declared emergency,” would place a ban in statute, where no future commission can undo it.

Thank you for the letter, senators. Now write the bill.

Mike McFarlane
Springfield