More Prescribed Burning Could Reduce Wildland Fire Impact, Study Finds

Western wildlands beset with increasingly severe fire seasons, including in California, would do well to follow the example of the nation’s Southeast and increase use of preventive prescribed burns, according to a newly published study.

Prescribed, or controlled burns, consume brush and other combustibles to reduce the fuel available to a random fire that might occur during more adverse heat and wind conditions, and thereby, reduce the chance of it taking off.

“We’re Not Doing Enough Prescribed Burns in the Western United States to Mitigate Wildfire Risk,” is the title of the study, authored by Crystal Kolden, PhD, Associate Professor of Fire Sciences at the University of Idaho.

“The question isn’t, ‘Is it feasible?'” said Kolden. “The question is, ‘What happens if we don’t?'”

The study found that with increasing use of prescribed burns in the Southeast, that region has largely avoided the rise in monstrous wildfires that have increasingly besieged the West, consuming hundreds of thousands of acres.

The windblown Camp Fire last November claimed at least 85 lives as it sped from forest into the Sierra Nevada foothill community of Paradise.

Prescribed burning in the West dates back generations, but in the past two decades its use by many agencies has lessened, or at most stayed level, according to data collected and organized by Kolden into spreadsheets. Budget constraints, environmental impact concerns, and fear of the risk of a burn going out of control are among the factors she sees.

“All those things can be overcome if everyone agrees that the most important thing is to really reduce and mitigate the risk of catastrophic wildfires,” Kolden said during an interview Wednesday in San Diego.

Last fall, President Trump blamed California’s massive fire disasters on forest mismanagement by the state, though much of the forest and other wildland in California is owned and managed by the federal government.

Two months ago, California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency stemming from wildfires, and waived environmental review requirements to hasten 35 high priority projects to lessen fire risk in areas deemed especially at risk.

Officials at multiple county fire departments in California speak of the challenges of getting through a maze of reports, reviews, permits and approvals required to proceed with a prescribed burn.

“I think the last one I did it took about 16 or17 months,” said Capt. Ken VanWig, Vegetation Management Program Manager for the Ventura County Fire Department. It continues to conduct wildfire training on private land, but has not done a prescribed burn to reduce fuel loads in two years, VanWig said. Late in 2017, he had finished the permitting process for four areas, but regrettably, the Thomas Fire got to them first.

Los Angeles County fire had scheduled for this fall a prescribed burn on 400 acres in Malibu near Big Rock, an area that did not burn during last year’s Woolsey Fire. Despite support from Malibu City Hall, the plan ran into opposition and has been put on hold. It may be altered to call for fuel reduction by cutting and removing, which is more labor intensive and time consuming.

Final approval is still being sought for a prescribed burn in Tonner Canyon near Diamond Bar, according to Ron Durbin, LA County Fire’s acting Asst. Chief Forester. By his recollection, it has been 11 years since the department last did a prescribed burn.

The Orange County Fire Authority has no prescribed burns planned within its jurisdiction, but does work with the Cleveland National Forest on controlled burns within the federal land.

Prescribed burns continue to be a small part of the vegetation management practices of the Angeles National Forest, accounting for 264 of the 2,671 acres treated so far this year, according to Information Officer Nathan Judy.

Prof. Kolden believes funding approved in Congress last year could enable prescribed burning to increase in the western national forests–but only if emergency demand for fire fighting stops taking so much from funds budgeted for prevention.

Most every rural property owner in flyover land knows that. I burn about 5 acres every year and clean up fallen branches and trees because I don’t want my house to burn down if a neighbor’s land catches on fire. I live right up against 3 million acres of Mark Twain National Forest. There’s wind and red flag weather but we don’t have 1,000s of acres forest fires because it’s well managed.

Many millions of rural people know about prescribed burns. But hey, we’re deplorable so Cali has a mental block that won’t let them learn from anyone like us.

I just filed my third California Prescribed Fire Plan, which I see as capital investment in a property management system. I’m hoping the way I go about it helps build a model for both CalFire and for homeowners in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) to use prescribed fire as part of the tool kit to manage our vegetation, wildfire access, structure protection, and evacuation planning. I put ours up on the Wildergarten.org website last year and will be posting the 2025 version once it is approved. I fill out the Plan with its legalese in Word per their template and then added an Addendum I did in PowerPoint printed to pdf.

The idea of the Addendum is for the Battalion Chiefs to have the pdf file already on their smart phones with maps and images to facilitate defense of our property: how to get here, where the roads and trails on the property go, how the vegetation is arranged, where the utilities are, where the hazardous materials are stored, and where the firefighting infrastructure is located, (including a helicopter LZ (landing zone)). The maps have numbered locations where burning is typically done and photos of what those areas look like as one approaches them from a road. That way they aren’t driving all over the property looking through smoke for a burn and they know what the vegetation will be like when they get there. That way, when it comes time to execute a planned burn, (a large pile for example), I need only text an image of the pile to the Battalion Chief for approval the day of the burn with comments re the preparations for that ignition. If it’s not good (say if the local stations are on a call) the Battalion Chief can call it off. That way, I’m not waiting for them to get here to inspect because they’re overwhelmed with driving all over the mountains to look at every pile. A copy of that Plan has been sent to John Morgan (Staff Chief - Wildfire Risk Reduction) at CalFire in Sacramento for his consideration so that this means can be more widely adopted. As to the helicopter LZ, I have submitted a separate pdf to CalFire for an eventual helicopter evacuation plan with maps of the associated parking areas and staging locations, but that is as far as that has gone so far. For a well organized evacuation plan with roads as tortuous as ours, I think we need much more.

As to burning outside the normal backyard burn season, my Plan states that when I’m about to do an ignition, I will I send all my neighbors a blast text message containing the same photos as I provided to the Battalion Chief. But I do something else that is not required, which is to blast text a similar message when I’m done with another photo showing that things went according to Plan. That way, if something bad happens to me and they don’t get the text, they can call it in before the problem gets too big. That way, CalFire and the neighbors develop confidence in me to do this safely.

I live in the Ozarks and many of the small cities are in the basins/valleys. Many of those small cities are hot spots for big city people from St Louis and even IL who come here to canoe, kayak and tube down a large Spring fed river. Tons of resorts and campgrounds. Here's the terrain. We manage.

It's not done on overly windy days or during red flag weather. These cities and resorts have been there for decades. We have oak/hickory forests along with pine and cedar. Not exactly fire resistant species. The preferred time is when things are fairly dry and rain is coming. It's just a matter of thinking things through. Since our minds aren't cluttered with DEI, ESG of communist revolution, it's not that hard. For others, the issue is never the issue, there is only the revolution, which leaves no time for common sense.

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