May 26, 2022
The importance of prescribed fire, plus, it's fire season and federal wildland firefighters still aren't being paid enough
Welcome, it’s almost June. Despite being mostly in bed, recovering from spinal surgery, I’ve been following the fires in New Mexico, which started in early May. Honestly, it feels like dejavu.
My first ever fire (in 2000) was the Viveash Fire, near Pecos, NM, not far from where the Hermit’s Peak and Calf Canyon fires have been burning. I was brand new to firefighting. I mean, listen, I only started working as a wildland firefighter because I was a college dropout with a penchant for drugs and booze who needed something stabilizing— I certainly didn’t know that a prescribed burn had gotten out of control only a week earlier and turned into what we now know as the Cerro Grande Fire, or that the Cerro Grande would cause federal entities to invoke more fire suppression and less prescribed fire. The consequences, in my humble opinion, were disastrous, and have led to increasingly volatile fire (coupled with climate change).
The same thing is happening now. On May 19, the USFS paused all prescribed and controlled fire operations at a crucial time for…prescribed burning operations (specifically in northern regions). While this isn’t a total ban on prescribed fire, it’s not a great sign.
In the Cerro Grande aftermath, the blame for the fire’s escape was first blamed on individuals. Not until after the release of the lessons learned was the blame instead placed on faulty Park Service policies which, taken one by one, we flawed, but grouped together into one event “proved seriously inadequate.” One must remember that the Park Service had only started burning in earnest two decades earlier, after the release of The Leopold Report.
It wasn’t only the Park Service who was at fault, but also a lack of interagency communication that arguably continues to be an issue on prescribed fires that cross agency lines.
If we’ve learned any lessons from Cerro Grande, I would hope it would be the near inevitability of a fire’s escape every once in a while. While there’s no final report on the fire that escaped in New Mexico…
