fire prevention

Nearly every member of the Vedauwoo Volunteer Fire Department resigned over the recent firing of their chief. The area is still being served by another nearby department.

Fire crews are starting to do some prescribed burning in Grand Teton National Park this week. The efforts help reduce future wildfire risk by burning dead wood and brush in the cooler late fall conditions.

Fire danger is continuing to rise throughout the state as summer progresses. Fire restrictions are in place across much of Wyoming, with recent bans in Yellowstone National Park and Devil’s Tower National Monument.

Heat advisories have been issued for much of eastern Wyoming from noon on Thursday to Sunday night. Those advisories include the areas around Bighorn Basin, Wind River Basin, and Natrona and Johnson counties.

Fire danger has been raised to “moderate” for the Teton area. That includes Grand Teton National Park, Bridger-Teton National Forest and the National Elk Refuge. The increase is due to warmer and windier conditions, and the fact that grasses, shrubs and trees are drying out.

This Memorial Day weekend, the Bureau of Land Management hopes people can get out and enjoy the beautiful landscapes of Wyoming. But they also want to make sure that people are doing their part to prevent any unnecessary wildfires on public lands.

Home insurance is becoming a more uncertain market, in large part due to climate-fueled disasters like wildfires. Some states in the West are taking steps to address the situation, like Oregon where a 2023 law requires insurers to account for home-hardening measures in their underwriting models. In California, they’re trying to take it a step further.

Many Indigenous peoples in North America have long standing traditions of cultural burning, the deliberate ignition of fires for a wide array of purposes. With the robust participation of tribal members, a new paper tries to quantify the scale of past burning by the Karuk people of Northern California.

A new paper finds that current wildfire suppression policies can increase fire severity as much as decades of fuel accumulation and climate change. Using fire models, the area burned annually grew much faster under current suppression policy when compared to a policy of allowing low- and moderate-intensity blazes to burn.

The Forest Service’s recently released “Strategy to Expand Prescribed Fire Training in the West” document is blunt: “The prescribed fire implementation environment continues to grow in complexity, IT READS, whereas the ability of practitioners to practice and hone their expertise has lagged, particularly in the Western United States.” The newly established Western Prescribed Fire Training Center is a major effort to address that workforce issue.