Wildland fire supervisor encourages Columbia County residents to prepare and protect their property from the dangers of wildfire.
By Scott Laird
Kelly Niles has been helping spread the word about the dangers of wildfire across Columbia County. In a series of presentations to local groups in 2025, Kelly promoted protecting your property by creating a defensible space around your home.
“In the summer, where everything’s dry and ready to burn, wildland fires can get out of hand pretty quickly,” says Kelly, who has been the wildland fire supervisor for the Oregon Department of Forestry in Columbia County for 23 years and works out of the Columbia City office. “So, people having defensible space makes a lot more sense in a small county like this, where we don’t have a whole lot of resources. Having a defensible space increases the odds of your home still being there when the fire is done.”
A defensible space is a natural or managed area around a home or structure designed to act as a buffer and slow the spread of wildfire, improving the chances homes or other structures will survive a wildfire.
“Educating more people to do these steps makes a big difference, because not only are you taking care of your place, but it also makes you a better neighbor,” Kelly says. “I always tell people, you don’t really ever see a golf course burn because it’s lean, clean, and green.”
Kelly believes it’s good for people to be prepared and self-sufficient. Columbia County is a big place, very spread out, with lots of trees and limited resources.
“Columbia County covers 35,000 acres,” he says. “Fire can double in size every few minutes and get really big in a hurry.”
ODF has 7 permanent staff stationed in the county, and Kelly hires a seasonal crew of 12.
“We have six fire engines with 2 people per engine to cover the entire county,” he says. “There are people who think if there’s a fire, the fire department’s going to come—it’s what they pay them for. But if we get a large fire, there are not enough firefighters here in the county to do that. We don’t have the capacity. This is why defensible space is huge.”
As Columbia County grows, Kelly notes there will be people who don’t have experience living in such a rural setting.
“We have people that don’t want to live in the city anymore, and they want to move out in the country,” he says. “But they might not know a whole lot about wildfire danger and what they can do for themselves.”
Kelly is the ideal person to help spread the defensible spaces message. He grew up in Eugene and started school to be a structural firefighter, but he found out college wasn’t for him. He joined the military, spending 4 years in the U.S. Marine Corps.
After the military, he moved to Coos Bay, where he got a job with the Coos Fire Patrol in 1992 before joining ODF. He’s also served as a volunteer firefighter for 20 years with Columbia Fire and Rescue in St. Helens and, before that, served with Mohawk Valley Rural Fire District in Springfield.
“Each time I’ve moved or got promoted, I’ve joined the local volunteer department,” Kelly says.
Columbia County has not recently been impacted by the kind of large, devastating wildfires that other parts of Oregon have been experiencing.
“We are a bit lucky, because we have a great fire prevention partner here called Mother Nature,” Kelly says, noting the historically wet climate.
But it could still happen, he says.
This past summer, there were about 30 separate wildfires in Columbia County.
“Most people didn’t hear about them,” Kelly says. “We’ve just been very successful in keeping them small.”
As a former volunteer firefighter, Kelly is quick to praise the efforts of the local rural fire protection districts that assist ODF in combating wildfires when they do occur in the region.
“It’s a real good cooperative effort to keep them small,” he says. “But we’ve dodged a bullet a few times.”
In the years Kelly has been involved with fighting wildland fires, not much has changed—except for 1 big difference.
“The same principles that we’ve been talking about for years still apply,” he says. “The only thing that’s changing—whether people want to believe it or not—is the climate. Climate change is real. The data that we track shows our summers are getting longer, average rainfalls and average temperatures are changing. And it’s not getting better.”
Those stats make defensible spaces all the more important.
“Does it mean your house is going to survive a wildfire?” Kelly asks. “No, but there’s plenty of data out there that it will improve the chances of your house surviving if you follow some simple steps.”