Forest Service Halts Prescribed Burns in California. Is It Worth the Risk? | KQED

“Basically everyone is burning, except for the feds right now. I’m looking around at my fire friends — the state is burning, the tribes are burning, the prescribed burn associations are burning. And we haven’t seen much from the federal agencies burning. And then to get this notice just seems almost laughable in the face of seeing what’s going on in the private sector.”

Long term, the risks to communities are much worse if we don’t see prescribed fire on the ground, Quinn-Davidson said.

As an example of the effectiveness of prescribed fire in protecting communities, Wara pointed to the burn done by Forest Service crews in the San Bernardino National Forest just five months before the Line Fire, which threatened the community of Angelus Oaks last month.

In a post on Facebook this week, the Forest Service said that the burn “created a fuel break that helped slow the fire’s intensity.” With the work of fire crews, the Line Fire “never crossed any of the fuel breaks,” the agency said.

As recently as last week, it appeared that prescribed burning was forecast to go ahead as normal on federal land. On Oct. 16, the Forest Service Region 5, covering California and Hawaii, posted a press release on its website titled “U.S. Forest Service Poised to Start Fall Prescribed Burning.”

“We set a record for number of prescribed acres burned last year, and we will continue to lead the way in accomplishing this important work,” Pacific Southwest Region Fire Director Jaime Gamboa said in the statement.

But conditions don’t seem to have lined up with what the federal agency was expecting.