Eugene, Springfield’s ‘luck’ fades in new wildfire reality, leaders warn

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the leadership in attendance at the meeting. Sen. Ron Wyden was in attendance on Wednesday.

Leaders in wildfire management gathered Wednesday to confront a new reality: Cities in the Southern Willamette Valley are now on the frontlines of wildfires. 

“The threat is real,” said U.S. Rep. Val Hoyle, D-Oregon, who joined U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, and Lane County Commissioner Heather Buch in a press conference at the Bureau of Land Management’s interagency office in Springfield. The three urged residents within Eugene and Springfield to take fire danger seriously, warning that this level of threat is something we’ve only begun to face recently.

So far, people within city limits have emerged unscathed, largely by chance, even as megafires have burned across Lane County since 2020. They pointed to the Holiday Farm Fire as a close call — when strong winds pushed the blaze over mountain ridges into the foothills of Springfield. 

“It was pure dumb luck that the wind changed and it did not reach Springfield, and we can’t just live on luck,” said Buch, who was heavily involved in the recovery efforts along the McKenzie River. “We have to be prepared.” 

And they said preparedness is a shared responsibility between everyday people and the government agencies tasked with keeping them safe. 

For individuals, that means having an escape route planned in advance, signing up for the OR-Alert system, and having a go bag ready to grab at a moment’s notice. It also means adapting to this new fire reality by creating defensible space and hardening homes, like upgrading materials to withstand embers and clearing vegetation to reduce the risk of flames reaching structures. 

For the government, preparedness means having a strategy and prepositioning resources so fires can be stopped before they grow to hundreds or thousands of acres. That’s something the Oregon Department of Forestry, the Oregon State fire marshal, and Gov. Tina Kotek say they’re ready for this year.

But about half the land in Lane County is federally owned, mostly by the U.S. Forest Service. The effects of the federal defunding to environmental agencies may become most apparent during emergencies this summer, especially if evacuations are underway.

“That’s when it gets really real for people,” Buch said. “We need to make sure that they know where to go. Our planned resiliency hubs would have been perfect for that, and we’re still working to see if we can continue to get those resiliency hubs.” 

Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency notified Lane County that it had terminated a $19.5 million grant that would have funded six extreme weather shelters across the area, including a site in West Eugene. 

It’s one of many resources chipped away by budget cuts and shifting priorities under the Trump administration.

Nearly 500 Forest Service jobs have been lost in Region 6, which includes the Pacific Northwest. No specific figures have been released for national forests in Lane County, such as the Willamette and Siuslaw, and it remains unclear how many of those jobs have been reinstated.

Wyden specifically warned that cuts to the National Weather Service “take a real toll in being able to respond to immediate dangers.”

The senator, who toured federally hosted interagency offices in Portland and Medford this week, told reporters the meteorological outlook he heard in the Willamette Valley echoes what he heard in Southern Oregon: above-average temperatures and below-average precipitation are expected over the next three months.

Southern Oregon has long experienced some of the worst wildfires in the state — and in recent years, the situation has grown so extreme that fires are now burning in areas that have already burned.

“What the experts are telling us: we need to treat this as a wake-up call,” Wyden said. “This is going to be a serious season.”