More fires, less damage, and people still cause more fires than lightning
By Khushboo Rathore, Oregon Journalism Project
Despite early forecasts of a punishing 2025 wildfire season, Oregon escaped relatively unscathed.
The season started with an ominous blaze. In just a few days in June, the Rowena Fire, just west of The Dalles, destroyed 56 homes and 100 additional structures. By that measure, the Oregon Department of Forestry said, it was the one of the state’s worst ever.
But midseason rains, cooler temperatures, and quicker responses prevented wider damage across the state during the fire season, ODF said.
Here’s what an OJP analysis of available Forestry Department data found.
The amount of fire-damaged acres was way down, but the number of fires was higher
Less than 400,000 acres burned in 2025, only one-fifth of the 2 million acres ravaged the year before and well below the 10-year average of 680,000.
Oregon Department of Forestry officials told lawmakers recently that despite seeing fewer huge fires — or “conflagrations” — Oregon actually suffered more wildland fires this year than in 2024, with 1,160 starting on state-protected lands alone.
The vast majority of fires on state forest land — 94% — were 10 acres or less.
Kyle Williams, deputy director of fire operations at the Oregon Department of Forestry, attributed the small size of the fires to “the complete and coordinated system we have here in Oregon and the quality of the folks that respond.”
Matt Donegan, chair of the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission, highlighted one fire. In September, the 23,000-acre Flat Fire that roared within 2 miles of Sisters in Deschutes County. Thousands of structures came under evacuation orders, but the blaze destroyed only five homes.
More fires than average were human-caused this past season
In the last decade, humans caused 7 out of 10 wildfires on state-protected land. (Lightning accounted for the rest.) In 2025, the number of human-caused fires exceeded the 10-year average by 33, totaling 796.
“It is disappointing to see that our human-caused fires were up from our 10-year average,” Williams said in a presentation Nov. 18 to the Oregon Senate’s Interim Committee on Veterans, Emergency Management, Federal and World Affairs.
“We need a lot more help from Oregonians to not start fires from their activities and our infrastructure,” he said.
According to ODF data, the human causes of fire, in declining order, include equipment use, debris burning, recreation, smoking, arson, juveniles, and railroads.
Oregon needs to focus more on preventing fires
Oregon’s management of wildfires still has a long way to go, Donegan says. “ODF, it’s got some dedicated resources, not nearly what they need.”
To prevent catastrophic impacts, Donegan argues the state must greatly expand preventive efforts. He would like to see ODF remove excess fuel on about a third of 13 million acres of forests the state identified as having a high fire risk.
But the prescribed burns and mechanical removal of trees comes at a price, some $10 billion, according to Donegan. That may sound impossible, he says, but the alternative is catastrophe on a scale Oregon has not yet witnessed.
“We’re going to have to muster the resources,” Donegan says. “I think it’s increasingly becoming nonnegotiable.”
Khushboo Rathore is a data and engagement reporter for the Oregon Journalism Project. She has journalism and information science degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park.
