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Level 3 “Get Out Now” evacuation orders remain in effect for parts of the Chiwawa River valley in Chelan County, more than two months after lightning sparked what has become the largest wildfire ever recorded in the county’s history. As of the county’s Sept. 16 update, the Little Giant Fire had burned more than 172,000 acres and stood at 81% containment — a marked change from local radio station KPQ’s mid-August count of roughly 142,000 acres and 15% containment, but still a fire firefighters are holding rather than declaring beaten.
A fire that keeps redrawing its own map
The Little Giant Fire started July 15 in the Chiwawa River valley near Leavenworth, and Chelan County declared a local state of emergency on Aug. 4 as the fire’s footprint kept expanding through the Entiat and Chiwawa drainages. Gov. Bob Ferguson’s statewide wildfire emergency declaration, issued Aug. 1, covers the fire but was not written for Chelan County alone — it responded to a summer of drought, heat and wind that pushed more than 900,000 acres of Washington land to burn this year, according to state fire officials cited by KOMO News on Sept. 15.
Even as containment lines have grown, the county’s evacuation map has not simply shrunk in a straight line. The Sept. 16 update from Chelan County Emergency Management extended the Level 3 zone farther south, to the intersection of Deep Creek and Lower Chiwawa River Road, and added structures in the Alder Creek area, including Goose Creek Flat, to the highest-risk category. Residents there are being told to leave immediately — not to prepare, not to watch conditions, but to go. The county’s active-emergencies page carried no update loosening those orders as of this writing.
The U.S. Forest Service has closed portions of the Wenatchee River and Entiat Ranger Districts under an order that runs through Oct. 31 unless rescinded sooner, covering roads, trailheads, campgrounds and dispersed recreation sites that would otherwise be filling with the last hikers and hunters of the season.
Commissioners take the fight to Congress
Eight days before that evacuation zone grew again, the Chelan County Board of Commissioners voted, on Sept. 8, to send a letter to Washington’s congressional delegation — Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell and Rep. Kim Schrier — asking for money and manpower the county says it does not control on its own. The reason, spelled out in the letter and posted on the county’s website, is blunt: 78% of the land inside Chelan County’s borders is federally owned, and U.S. Forest Service land alone accounts for more than 70% of the county.
“Congress must drastically increase the pace, scale, and investments in these forest treatments, removing the overabundance of smaller trees, clearing underbrush, and applying prescribed fire following the strategic thinning,” the letter states. On response time, the commissioners were equally direct, writing that new fires should be met with a fast, heavy response — air assets and firefighting personnel arriving “no later than the first 24 hours” after ignition, rather than after a fire has already outgrown initial attack.
It is worth naming what the letter does not ask for: no dollar figure, no specific bill number, no promise from any of the three federal officials it was addressed to. A press release and a commission vote are not the same thing as new federal funding, and nothing in the county’s public filings on the letter indicates Murray, Cantwell or Schrier’s offices have yet responded on the record. The commissioners are the ones on the record here; the delegation, so far, is not.
What the numbers don’t show
Acreage and containment percentages describe fire behavior, not what a fire costs a county that depends on summer tourism and orchard labor arriving on schedule. Chelan County’s own commissioners have made the case that the county cannot fireproof land it does not own or manage — most of the ground burning is Forest Service land, which means decisions about thinning, prescribed burns and firefighting budgets are made in Wenatchee National Forest offices and in Washington, D.C., not at the county courthouse. That gap between who bears the risk and who controls the response is precisely what the Sept. 8 letter was written to close.
County officials have not released a public damage estimate specific to structures lost along the Little Giant Fire’s Entiat Valley and Chiwawa corridor advances, even as the fire’s footprint — at more than 172,000 acres — makes it the largest ever recorded in Chelan County. Residents under Level 3 orders in the Alder Creek and Goose Creek Flat areas are checking the county’s emergency page for updates that, as of Sept. 16, had not arrived.
Sources: Chelan County Emergency Management, Chelan County Board of Commissioners, KOMO News, U.S. Forest Service, Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, Little Giant Fire overview.
