AUBURN — In the back row of a small community college classroom, I sip my coffee and consider a cumulus cloud, a puffy white pillar over an expanse of blue. I’m staring not out the window, but at a presentation on a screen at the front of the room.
Cumulus clouds are a telltale sign of an unstable atmosphere, Matthew Dehr, wildland fire meteorologist with the Washington Department of Natural Resources, tells our class. Fifteen students, clad in hoodies and flannel, nod along. They know what an unstable atmosphere means: Smoke will disperse instead of settling over the ground — in other words, ideal conditions for setting stuff on fire.
My classmates and I make up the fifth group to take Washington’s Certified Prescribed Burn Manager course. It’s put on by the state DNR to encourage more residents to light carefully planned fires in overly dense forests to help ward off megablazes.
After decades of warnings from Smokey Bear to prevent forests from burning, the state’s approach would now be better illustrated by a soot-smeared Uncle Sam urging citizens to pick up a drip torch.