SEATTLE — As the Pioneer Fire spread within a mile of the remote northern Washington town of Stehekin, emergency workers ran door to door Sunday asking residents to leave.
The evacuation alert had been raised to the highest level.
“There are boats out,” said Rich Magnussen, an emergency management specialist with Chelan County. “They’re out twice a day to get people out who choose to leave.”
There are not many candidates. Most residents have stayed in their homes, choosing to strengthen their defenses and support firefighters rather than flee.
“We will do everything we can to get people out, but due to the fire conditions we cannot guarantee that,” Magnussen added.
Stehekin is a tight-knit community on the shores of Lake Chelan, a deep, 50-mile-long lake that winds through the North Cascade Mountains—some of the most rugged landscape in the United States. Stehekin is not connected to the rest of the state by road. The only quick escape is by helicopter or boat.
“We really need those people to get downstream and out of harm’s way,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said in a video address on Xand called on residents to evacuate.
But by Wednesday afternoon, three days later, 90 of the area’s 95 residents had decided to stay, Magnussen said. He said Washingtonians have the legal right to stay and defend their homes during a wildfire.
Chelsea Courtney, a Stehekin resident and artist who works at the local pastry shop, decided to stay.
“There are a lot of really independent people here who are used to being extremely resourceful and relying on their neighbors,” Courtney said. “People care passionately about this valley and the life they’ve built here and I don’t think we fully trust entities with the management choices that have been made.”
Courtney said Stehekin residents appreciate the efforts of firefighters, but also question why the fire couldn’t have been handled more aggressively when it started in June. She added that there were occasional communication issues between fire managers and residents, and she doesn’t understand why more couldn’t have been done in the colder months to better adapt the forest to the changing climate.
Mistaya Johnston, a local paramedic and ranch resort owner, added, “There are a lot of people here who just don’t have self-confidence,” and in such a self-sufficient community, many people want to fend for themselves when the stakes are so high.
“If our company goes bankrupt, we won’t get paid,” Johnston said.
Feelings like these are common during stressful wildfires in the rural West. As large, intense wildfires and evacuations become more common, some residents are growing weary of uprooting their lives and are becoming desensitized to the risk — or more confident in their own ability to manage it.
This means that some people are determined to stay in their homes even when authorities tell them to leave. This is especially true when there is a breakdown of trust between communities and those responsible for managing bushfires and disaster relief.
“Especially in rural communities, we’re seeing more and more people deciding to stay and defend themselves,” said Amanda Stasiewicz, an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Oregon who studies evacuation decisions. “There’s a lot of mistrust there.”
As fires become more intense due to climate change and overgrowth of forests, doubts may arise in rural communities as fire managers operate more conservatively than in the past.
“People were used to dealing with fires in different ways decades ago, and now there’s a different reality,” Stasiewicz said. “Now we see fires acting more radically, creating their own weather, and being more unpredictable.”
These dynamics are also playing out elsewhere in rural communities.
Some Northern California residents whose homes are threatened by the Park Fire — now more than 397,000 acres in size and the fourth-largest in state history as of Friday morning — have similarly decided not to evacuate, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. One couple told the Chronicle they were tired of evacuating after waiting 10 days to return home following the Camp Fire in 2018.
There are about 94 major fires burning in the West, with more than 29,000 Wilderness firefighters working to extinguish them, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Of those fires, 28 have active evacuation orders.
“When it gets to this point, everyone is on deck and resources run out,” said Brad Bramlett, a public information officer assigned to the Pioneer Fire.
The Pacific Northwest in particular has been in turmoil this summer, with 51 major fires raging across Oregon, Washington and Idaho. A warmer, drier than normal spring and summer have primed the landscape for fire.
As of Friday morning, the Stehekin area was under a red flag warning for dangerous fire conditions, the National Weather Service said. The Pioneer Fire had grown to more than 33,700 acres and was about 12% contained.
In most years, the fire season has just begun.
Stehekin’s full-time population is about 85, and residents take small-town life to the extreme. The community resisted telephone service until the early 2000s.
Surrounded by glacier-capped peaks and the clear waters of Lake Chelan, the city swells in the summer as tourists take the 2.5-hour ferry ride to the trailheads of North Cascades National Park, which begin in Stehekin.
The Pioneer Fire began on June 8 and has been slowly moving north, burning in some of the most challenging terrain firefighters face in the U.S., with steep slopes, rocky outcrops and few paths.
“When I heard it, I was like, ‘Okay, here we go,'” Courtney said. “We all know how dry and early the spring has been. It felt like the fire season was going to be accelerated.”
According to Courtney, Stehekin residents are already planning and preparing, clearing brush from homes, building a floating dock in the harbor and holding neighborhood meetings.
Tourists were forced to leave on July 25, when emergency services raised the evacuation level to 2 out of 3.
Meanwhile, firefighters have poured into Stehekin. More than 640 firefighters are battling the blaze, though not everyone is stationed in the city. Johnston said she and her team of six have been serving about 200 meals a day to crews.
On Sunday, emergency services asked everyone in the city to leave.
Magnussen said emergency services cannot guarantee any help, especially if the jetty – “the only way out,” as he described it – burns down.
“If they choose to stay, they do so at their own risk,” he said.
Courtney said she recognizes that, but she worries that leaving Stehekin now could leave her unable to return for weeks, if not longer. She feels her self-sufficient community, filled with people who own boats and are used to working the land, is prepared to withstand fires for the time being.
A few previous perils have also hardened her attitude toward fire. Courtney witnessed the Wolverine Fire in 2015, which burned more than 60,000 acres near Stehekin, and last month she went out on the lake with family and friends a few miles away to save her uncle’s property after firefighters left.
“My tolerance has increased,” she said.
Stasiewicz said that based on her own focus groups, surveys and interviews, feelings like Courtney’s are increasingly common in rural communities. Evacuation often comes with high financial costs, she said, and some rural residents worry that their properties are not being prioritized.
“Sometimes we see rural communities losing out compared to more developed areas. There’s a mentality of, ‘Maybe we should take care of ourselves,’” Stasiewicz said.
Moreover, she added, longer fire seasons with more frequent fires put a heavy burden on people.
“If I’m told every summer to evacuate and they’re all failures, then there’s a cry wolf effect,” Stasiewicz said. “You lose trust in experts who say you have to evacuate.”
For authorities, these trends mean that it is becoming increasingly difficult to convince people to leave. At the same time, fire managers are faced with more dramatic fire behavior, which may lead them to make more conservative decisions, including issuing evacuation warnings more often and more widely.
In Stehekin, residents and firefighters have cut barriers along the eastern edge of town and installed sprinklers that draw water from the lake.
Planes and helicopters scoop water from Lake Chelan and pour it on the fire.
Courtney said incident management teams rotate in shifts; the most recent group was more communicative and proactive. She has helped firefighters every day at Stehekin Pastry Co.
Courtney said Stehekin’s future depends on the intensity of the fire, how well the containment line holds and whether winds blow the fire further into town.
And what happens if the fire actually reaches the city?
“I have access to a boat,” she said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com