Thank you for joining us for a special edition of Northwest Public Broadcasting's Weekly News Now.

Today we have Michele Steinberg.

The wildfire division director with the National Fire Protection Association.

And we're shooting this interview in May.

This is now the start of fire season.

Can you talk to me about how fire season has grown and extended over the years?

Certainly what we're seeing now is, any more we talk about a wildfire year, rather than a wildfire season, to where we're seeing fires happening on the landscape in various parts of the United States in times that we don't consider seasonable looking back on history.

We're also seeing fires, growing faster and consuming more vegetation.

Unfortunately, we have a lot of our homes and communities and businesses that are in the way, of these wildfires, when they occur.

We've certainly seen that here in the Northwest.

Fires are getting bigger.

They're getting stronger.

It's already a drought up here in the Northwest, and it's expected to be a hot and dry summer.

What can folks do to prepare?

And what should they do right now?

Right.

So right now, is a great time to get together with family, friends and neighbors to do risk reduction projects around homes and in sort of the common areas of your community.

Talking to your fire service, friends in the fire departments about what to expect during fire season or when the danger is high and doing these projects around homes is really critical.

It can be a feel good, but the good news is it can really make a big difference on whether homes ignite or or not during a wildfire.

What are some specific things that people should try to do, even in urban areas?

Right.

So, I talk about this a lot with, my friends and family who maybe don't think they have so much of a wildfire risk, but these are good common practices anyway, to make sure that our...

If we have gutters on our roofs, that those are clear of debris to make sure there's nothing within five feet of our foundations that could catch fire.

So even, again, if people are a little skeptical about, ‘well, will this wildfire really reach me?

Embers can be blowing into things like, flammable mulches, for example, piled up against your home.

You just don't want anything there that can burn.

And so these are really good practices for anybody in any situation to prevent any kind of ignition from the outside of the house to affect the home.

All right, Michele, what's the single most important thing people should remember or know about wildfire season?

Or year?

Well that wildfires can be unpredictable in the sense of how quickly they can move, and once they get into a community, it's going to now be your home and landscaping that's going to affect how that fire spreads.

You can do a lot of things right there to prevent fire from either destroying your home or spreading throughout the community.

Michele, thank you so much for joining us.