This Washington town is burning. That’s the plan.

In Roslyn, Washington, fire crews from local districts and conservation groups conducted a prescribed burn on a ridge above the town, deliberately igniting grasses and shrubs with drip torches while other teams stood by to contain embers. The effort follows a near-catastrophe: the 2017 Jolly Mountain Fire, which an incident commander warned could have made large parts of the town 'indefensible' before it changed course.

Since then, local leaders have burned more than 500 acres and mechanically thinned additional land, building a semicircle of cleared terrain around the town of 950 people, which ranks in the 99th percentile for wildfire risk nationally. The approach reflects a broader rethink of fire suppression policy, after a century of keeping fire out of forests left them dense with fuel, primed for the kind of megafires that have devastated Paradise, California, Los Angeles, and this summer, Spokane.

Federal researchers estimate more than 1,800 Western communities face similar wildfire threats, and a U.S. Forest Service official noted that private land — not just public forests — is often the gap fire can exploit on its way to homes.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.