Decades-Old “10 A.M. Rule” for Wildfire Suppression May Make a Comeback, Sparking Debate

The way America fights wildfires has swung back and forth for nearly a century, and it appears to be swinging again.

For much of the early 1900s, wildfires operated on something close to a deadline. After a series of devastating blazes, the U.S. Forest Service wanted to prove it could control the forests under its watch. In 1933, the agency established what became known as the “10 a.m. rule” — a mandate that any wildland fire be fully extinguished by 10 the following morning.

The policy grew out of horror over the Big Burn of 1910, a firestorm that tore across roughly 3 million acres along the Montana-Idaho border in just 36 hours, killing at least 85 people and wiping out five towns. Unlike an earthquake or a tornado, fire can be fought directly — with water, retardant, hand crews, bulldozers, and sometimes intentional burnouts designed to rob a wildfire of fuel.

But those very tools, history has shown, can create new dangers down the road.

The heroics tied to the 1910 disaster helped cement the Forest Service’s reputation and justify its existence as a federal agency. As former New York Times reporter Tim Egan once put it, the agency “owes its existence” to that fire. Yet Egan also pointed out the long-term cost of decades of aggressive suppression: forests packed with dead and overgrown timber that had never been allowed to burn naturally. He linked that buildup to catastrophic blazes later in the century, including the 1988 Yellowstone fires and major Idaho fires in the 1990s.

Researchers eventually gave this phenomenon a name: the “Wildfire Paradox.” In a 2013 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Rocky Mountain Research Station scientist David Calkin explained that stamping out nearly every fire — something crews manage to do 95% to 98% of the time — sets the stage for the rare fires that escape control to become far more destructive, burning hotter and spreading faster than firefighters can contain.

Land managers began recognizing this pattern in the 1960s and started allowing some fires in remote wilderness to burn themselves out, reducing fuel loads naturally. The Forest Service loosened the 10 a.m. rule in 1971 and scrapped it altogether by 1978.

In the decades that followed, fire policy continued to evolve alongside a warming, drying climate and shifting public priorities. A wetter mid-century period gave way to increasingly parched conditions by the century’s end. The 1988 Yellowstone fires burned 1.4 million acres in one of the country’s most iconic landscapes. Colorado’s 1994 South Canyon fire killed 14 firefighters and triggered a major overhaul of federal fire policy. Meanwhile, more and more homes were being built at the edge of fire-prone wildlands — an area now commonly referred to as the wildland-urban interface, or WUI.

By the early 2000s, a string of record-setting fire seasons made clear that firefighting had become one of the Forest Service’s largest and most unpredictable expenses, often outpacing available funding. Suppression costs, which hovered far lower in the 1990s, topped $2 billion in 2017 alone.

Then came 2018, one of the deadliest fire seasons in state history, highlighted by the Camp Fire, which killed more than 80 people in and around the Northern California town of Paradise.

Now, political pressure is once again pushing federal agencies toward a more aggressive suppression posture — for Southern California communities long familiar with fire season, a development worth watching closely.

Last June, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Empowering Commonsense Wildfire Prevention and Response.” The order opens by referencing the devastating January 2025 firestorms in Los Angeles, arguing that they exposed the dangers of state and local governments being unable to respond quickly enough to major blazes.

According to multiple sources within the wildfire policy community, earlier drafts of that order included language essentially reviving the old 10 a.m. rule.

“No one was dumb enough to use 10 a.m. policy language, but there was fear of a fire getting away,” said Bobbie Scopa, a firefighter with 45 years of experience at the local, state and federal levels who now serves as vice president of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. “Anytime you light a fire or purposefully don’t put out a fire, you own it and you own every bad thing that can happen. You’re taking a risk when you do that.”

Similar language calling for full suppression of all wildfires also appeared in early drafts of the Fix Our Forests Act, a bill working its way through Congress.

Matt Weiner, CEO of the advocacy group Megafire Action, said enshrining that approach into law could have had serious unintended consequences.

“We were able to get that out of it,” Weiner said. “And long-term, we will push aggressively against the 10 a.m. rule being included in statute anywhere. We don’t want to just create a suppression super-agency. We want a system that recognizes the need for a lot more beneficial fire on the landscape.”

Even so, the push toward aggressive firefighting hasn’t disappeared. At a July 22 hearing before the House Subcommittee on Forestry and Horticulture, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz told lawmakers his agency remains focused on hitting wildfires hard and fast this year.

“Keeping fire small protects firefighters, communities and also saves funding,” Schultz testified. “I assure you every fire has a full-suppression strategy.”

For residents across the Inland Empire and greater Southern California — where wildfire season now stretches nearly year-round — the debate over how aggressively to fight fire, and at what long-term cost, remains far from settled.

Original source: CalMatters