Since spring, seven people have died fighting fires in Colorado, Utah and Oregon: four firefighters killed in a burnover on Colorado’s Knowles Fire, two helicopter pilots lost in a crash in Utah, and a bulldozer contractor killed while cutting fireline in Oregon. Fires have scorched millions of acres and destroyed hundreds of structures throughout the region.

California, meanwhile, has been sending its own engines and crews out of state to help battle blazes in Colorado and the Pacific Northwest. But even with its deep bench of resources, the state isn’t immune to the strain being felt nationwide. The country has been operating at Preparedness Level 5 — the highest tier of wildfire response — since mid-July, meaning virtually every available firefighting asset is already committed. Requests for additional crews and equipment are increasingly going unmet.

**A shift toward full suppression**

The backdrop to this fire season is a significant restructuring at the federal level. The administration has merged wildland firefighting crews from four Interior Department agencies — the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs — into a newly formed U.S. Wildland Fire Service. That agency, along with the U.S. Forest Service, is now pursuing what officials call “full suppression,” meaning nearly every new wildfire is targeted for rapid extinguishment rather than being allowed to burn under controlled conditions for ecological benefit.

Administration officials describe the approach as a necessary response to a summer marked by extreme heat, drought and dangerous fire behavior. Brian Fennessy, the former Orange County Fire Authority chief who now leads the new Wildland Fire Service, said the agency’s fire officials — not land managers — now have final say on whether a fire is left to burn.

“When it was a fire for resource benefit, fire (officials) may have had a say, but they did not hold the final decision,” Fennessy said, describing the previous system under the Interior Department. “Now, we hold, on the fire side, that final decision.”

U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said his agency has not formally reinstated the old “10 a.m. rule” — a Depression-era policy requiring fires to be extinguished by the next morning — but acknowledged that the practical effect this summer has been much the same: aggressive knockdown of new fires rather than managed burns.

“We aren’t making any commitment to that time frame,” Schultz said, “but in terms of this time of the year, right now, we are not going to just sit back and let fire go and achieve other objectives. We’re going to be aggressively suppressing.”

Forest Service spokesperson Adrienne Freeman, who is based in California, said the calculus ultimately comes down to available resources. With national firefighting capacity stretched thin, there’s little room to manage fires for forest health right now.

“If something goes funny, we don’t know if we’re going to get the resources to manage it — and we pretty much know we aren’t because that’s not where houses are,” Freeman said.

**Concerns about long-term consequences**

Critics warn that treating full suppression as the default strategy — rather than one tool among several — could backfire over time. Decades of aggressive firefighting, combined with climate-driven drought, have already left many Western forests choked with dry, overgrown vegetation. Suppressing every fire without exception, some experts argue, only adds to that fuel buildup, setting the stage for future blazes that are harder to control.

Johanna Nosal, a forester who spent 15 years with the U.S. Forest Service in California, Colorado and Montana before taking a federal buyout in 2025, said prescribed burns can’t come close to matching the scale of what’s needed.

“We’re putting these fires out, and sometimes we’re successful at it… but it’s just a year-to-year Band-Aid,” Nosal said. “What eventually happens is you have a lack of resources and these weather periods that will create these huge blazes that no matter what you will do will keep spreading.”

Bobbie Scopa, a firefighter with 45 years of experience across local, state and federal agencies, estimates the government would need 30,000 to 40,000 more firefighters to actually make full suppression work — and even then, she said, “you still wouldn’t be successful.”

Reflecting the strain, incident commanders on Utah’s Widemouth 2 Fire, which has burned nearly 130,000 acres, say repeated requests for hand crews and engines have gone unfilled, forcing reliance on international assistance.

**California’s advantage — and its worries**

Few states are as well-positioned to absorb these federal changes as California, which has invested heavily in its own firefighting capacity over the years, including the world’s largest aerial firefighting fleet. Cal Fire now employs more than 12,000 people, making it the largest state fire agency in the country and second in size only to the U.S. Forest Service among wildland firefighting forces worldwide.

Cal Fire officials, including spokesperson Emily Kilgore in the Tuolumne-Calaveras Unit, say they haven’t noticed disruptions in coordination with federal partners so far this season, including during the recent Dove Fire near Yosemite.

Still, state leaders are wary of what federal cutbacks could mean down the line. California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot warned in a May letter to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins that the state has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars — nearly half a billion since Gov. Gavin Newsom took office — covering wildfire safety projects on federal lands that the Forest Service has historically underfunded.

“While I understand the intention to operate a more efficient federal agency, many of these changes could impact our state’s wildfire readiness and create added public safety risks,” Crowfoot wrote.

Federal agencies remain responsible for protecting roughly half of California’s land, with Cal Fire handling mostly rural, privately owned wildlands that make up about a third of the state. The stakes of getting that partnership right were made painfully clear last year, when catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles killed 31 people, contributed to hundreds of additional deaths, and caused up to $131 billion in property and economic losses, according to a UCLA analysis.

**An agency in transition**

The Forest Service itself is undergoing sweeping changes, including relocating its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City and consolidating research operations in Fort Collins, Colorado. The agency has shed 16% of its workforce since 2024, according to U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas, an Oregon Democrat who has pressed Schultz on the reorganization’s risks.

Salinas and others worry that separating fire crews from the land management agencies they once worked alongside could sever critical lines of communication — for instance, warnings about not bulldozing firelines through habitat for endangered species or culturally sensitive sites.

Fennessy disputes that concern, saying fire personnel and land managers remain co-located and in daily contact. “I question the motive or intent of those that want to make that argument,” he said.

Investigators are also still examining whether the broader reorganization played any role in the deaths of the firefighters killed on Colorado’s Knowles Fire in late June. Fennessy called any suggestion of a connection “ludicrous” and said he’s confident, based on his knowledge of the ongoing investigation, that “there is absolutely zero connection.”

For now, officials across the West acknowledge there’s no tidy resolution to the tension between protecting lives and property today and maintaining healthier forests for tomorrow.

“There’s no simple answer,” Scopa said. “We’re not gonna put out all the fires. We’re never going to be successful… The environment is not conducive to that, the fuels are not conducive to that, the staffing is not conducive to that.”

Original source: CalMatters

The post Trump Administration’s Wildfire Policy Overhaul Leaves California Bracing for Impact appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

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

The post Decades-Old “10 A.M. Rule” for Wildfire Suppression May Make a Comeback, Sparking Debate appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins formally filed a proposal to rescind the federal “roadless rule,” a 2001 regulation that bars road building and most logging in undeveloped national forest land. The rollback would affect more than 4 million acres of federally managed forest in California alone, potentially opening pristine backcountry to new roads, timber harvests and other development.

Rollins, who first floated the idea last year, said the change is meant to clear the way for more aggressive fuel management on public lands.

“For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities,” Rollins said in a statement announcing the move.

But the Forest Service’s own data complicates that argument. Agency researchers who studied roughly 850 miles of roads running through the Angeles, San Bernardino, Los Padres and Cleveland national forests — all of which include roadless sections — found that nearly two-thirds of human-caused wildfires over a 26-year period ignited near roadsides. Those are the places where people, sparks and dry, invasive grasses most often collide.

It’s a familiar problem for anyone who has followed California’s fire season: blazes rarely start from nowhere. A hiker burning toilet paper in the backcountry, a poorly wired hot tub, or a tow chain dragging sparks across dry grass — human activity, not lightning, sparks the vast majority of California’s wildfires, and roads make that activity possible in areas that would otherwise see little foot or vehicle traffic.

California officials have pushed back hard against the administration’s reasoning. In a letter sent to Rollins last September, state Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot argued that the roadless rule has not stood in the way of forest thinning or prescribed burns. He pointed out that more than 240,000 acres of roadless land in California have already undergone vegetation treatments to lower fire risk, including work in the Caples Creek area south of Lake Tahoe that helped protect nearby communities during the 2021 Caldor Fire.

Crowfoot warned that allowing construction, logging and mining in these areas “may put rural communities at increased risk of fire and significantly increase firefighting costs” for the state.

The concerns aren’t limited to California. A peer-reviewed study published earlier this year by researchers with The Wilderness Society found that, nationwide, wildfires are roughly four times more likely to ignite near roads than in roadless or wilderness areas. Ignition rates were lowest in designated wilderness, slightly higher in roadless zones, and highest within about 50 meters of a road.

“Opening our backcountry forests to more roads and development, and therefore more ignitions, is also not a wildfire solution, and never will be,” said Josh Hicks, director of conservation campaigns for The Wilderness Society.

Administration officials insist the rule change won’t automatically trigger new logging or road projects. Instead, they say, individual national forest managers will decide how to proceed based on local conditions, with input from states, tribes and nearby communities.

Still, skepticism runs deep among conservationists, particularly given a 2025 executive order from the administration calling for an “immediate expansion of American timber production.” Critics also note that the existing roadless rule already permits limited road construction when necessary to protect public safety from wildfire threats — raising questions about what additional flexibility the rollback would actually provide.

A group of former U.S. Forest Service chiefs, including one who served during Trump’s first term, wrote in an opinion piece last year that eliminating the rule would put critical watersheds and wildlife habitat at risk. They also questioned the practical logic behind the move.

“Why build more roads when the agency, strapped for resources, can’t even maintain the ones that already exist?” they wrote, adding that the reason many backcountry areas remain roadless in the first place is that their most valuable timber was harvested long ago, leaving behind resources that are costly and difficult to reach.

U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat and the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, condemned the timing of the announcement, coming as it does amid a brutal fire season and following deep staffing cuts at the Forest Service under the Trump administration. Huffman said he intends to fight the rule change in Congress.

“The Trump administration is at it again, selling out our public lands to corporate polluters, ignoring the overwhelming objections of the American people,” Huffman said. “It’s reckless.”

Members of the public have until midnight on September 21 to submit formal comments on the proposal through the federal government’s regulations portal.

Original source: CalMatters

The post Trump Administration’s Road-Building Push Raises Wildfire Concerns appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

The consequences extend well beyond the immediate destruction. Rising wildfire risk is driving up insurance costs for homeowners, threatening iconic natural resources like the state’s giant sequoias, and putting pressure on the mountain watersheds that supply much of California’s drinking water.

Forecasters are warning that 2026 could bring another above-average fire season. Recent years have shown that dangerous fires can erupt even after a wet winter, and the numbers tell a sobering story: severe wildfires have tripled in size across the Sierra Nevada since 1990, while the financial toll from wildfire damage has more than quadrupled over that same period.

It’s understandable that Californians feel exhausted by this pattern. Generations of aggressive fire suppression allowed brush and vegetation to accumulate across the landscape, setting the stage for more destructive blazes. Add a warming climate to the mix, and the conditions for catastrophic fire have only worsened.

There is, however, reason for cautious optimism. State agencies have launched an ambitious, coordinated push to reduce wildfire danger across 1 million acres of wildland every year — a goal overseen by a state task force and matched to the scale of the crisis at hand.

A new analysis from the Public Policy Institute of California, drawing on data tracked by that task force, found real momentum building. Between 2021 and 2024, the state averaged 591,000 acres per year of treatment aimed at reducing wildfire hazard, and that pace has been accelerating.

The task force’s newly unveiled five-year action plan reinforces a “worst first” approach, targeting the most vulnerable landscapes for treatment. That strategy appears to be working: 83% of the acreage treated through thinning, controlled burns and other methods was located in zones with high wildfire potential, areas where homes and wildlands meet, or both.

One of the clearest successes has been the resurgence of what’s known as beneficial fire — a practice with deep roots in California history. Native tribes used low-intensity, controlled burns to manage the land for thousands of years before European settlement disrupted that tradition. Now, prescribed and cultural burning is making a comeback, with acreage treated this way nearly doubling from roughly 100,000 acres in 2021 to about 200,000 acres in 2024.

That growth in prescribed and cultural burning offers a relatively low-cost, ecologically sound path toward restoring forest and woodland health across the state.

But this progress faces real headwinds. Federal agencies are stepping back from commitments to reduce wildfire risk, and the U.S. Forest Service — which oversees more than half of California’s forestland, along with other federal partners — has seen significant budget and staffing cuts. That retreat introduces new uncertainty into California’s broader wildfire strategy.

State funding is also on shakier ground. California’s wildfire mitigation budget could shrink by hundreds of millions of dollars as key revenue streams dry up. Lawmakers recently voted to restructure the state’s cap-and-trade program, which charges polluters for their emissions, a change expected to cut roughly $200 million a year from wildfire prevention funding.

Without stable, dedicated funding, this work — which affects public health, housing costs, water supplies and far more — simply won’t happen at the scale California needs.

Our research points to several ways the task force could sharpen its approach going forward. That includes better tracking of how long fire-reduction treatments actually remain effective, and providing more support to smaller, under-resourced partners so that mitigation work on private land — which may currently go unreported — gets properly counted.

Above all, this effort depends on a strong working relationship between state and federal agencies, a partnership that has already produced measurable results. Protecting that collaboration should be treated as a top priority.

The risks facing California communities keep growing, but so does the progress being made to confront them. This is the wrong moment to let that momentum slip away.

Original source: CalMatters

The post California Has Made Fire Prevention Gains, But Federal Cutbacks and Funding Woes Threaten That Progress appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.