What America Can Learn from Its Largest Wildfire of the Year

"During the twentieth century, the United States declared war on wildfires. In 1935, the chief of the U.S. Forest Service announced "an experiment on a continental scale": every blaze was to be put out by 10 A.M. on the morning after it began. Given that fires had been burning regularly for hundreds of millions of years, this was an enormous departure from the natural order. Fire clears vegetation and delivers nutrients to soil, creating fresh cycles of growth that help ecosystems."

"Park managers had already been planning to burn ten thousand of the surrounding acres in the fall of 2027, and they knew that the fire, which was dubbed Dragon Bravo by a dispatcher, would have a difficult time spreading. To the south and west, the rim of the canyon provided a natural barrier. To the north and east, along a dirt road called the W1, workers had already cleared a buffer."

During the twentieth century the United States pursued aggressive wildfire suppression, instituting a policy to extinguish every blaze by 10 A.M. the morning after it began. Suppression disrupted natural fire cycles that clear vegetation and replenish soils, producing denser forests prone to megafires, greater drought vulnerability, and encroachment of woods into prairies and wetlands. Beginning in the 1960s federal agencies shifted toward prescribed burns and, in some cases, allowing naturally ignited fires to restore landscapes. On July 4 a lightning strike started a small fire on the Grand Canyon North Rim that managers classified as a managed wildfire and chose to contain rather than extinguish. Park managers had planned a prescribed burn in the area, relied on the canyon rim and cleared buffers to limit spread, and used a modeling tool that created probability maps.

Read at The New Yorker