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

This week, the U.S. Forest Service directed its employees in California to stop prescribed burning “for the foreseeable future,” a directive that officials said is meant to preserve staff and equipment to fight wildfires if needed.

The pause comes amid the crucial fall window for planned, controlled burns, which remove fuel and can protect homes from future wildfires — raising concerns that the move will increase long-term fire risks.

“There are two times in the year when it’s safe to do prescribed fire: in the fall right before the rains come, and in the spring when things are dry enough to burn but not dry enough to burn it in a dangerous way,” said Michael Wara, energy and climate expert at Stanford University. He worries half of the prescribed fire season on federal lands will be sacrificed because of this decision.

“There is a risk aversion here that’s really damaging. The reality is, if there are mistakes on prescribed fires, people are likely to face consequences, even when those mistakes turn out to be positive,” Wara said.

He pointed to the Caples fire, which started as an escaped prescribed burn in 2019 but then protected the community of Kirkwood, near Tahoe, from the Caldor fire in 2021.

“I think the Forest Service is worried about the risk of something bad happening [with a prescribed burn]. And they’re willing to trade that risk — which they will be blamed for — for increased risks on wildfires,” Wara said. In the event of a wildfire, “if something bad happens, they’re much less likely to be blamed because they can point the finger at Mother Nature.”

A Forest Service spokesperson said that while the agency wanted to return to burning as soon as feasible, too many California-based crews were away fighting wildfires in other parts of the country to safely implement prescribed fire within the state.

“We’re hoping it’s a very temporary blip here. We just don’t have great climatic conditions right now,” said Adrienne Freeman, Region 5 public information officer.

While it’s not uncommon, nor especially disruptive, for individual planned burns to be put on pause due to weather conditions or lack of available resources, a blanket prohibition puts the stops on all federal work around the state. For some observers, that’s frustrating.

“It’s just a reminder that year after year, the Forest Service shuts down their prescribed fire program during really good burn windows,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the University of California Ag and Natural Resources Fire Network.

“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.

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

“I think we all expected a little more moisture last week,” Freeman said, noting that, with longer night hours, conditions for safe intentional burns were increasing while conditions for wildfires were decreasing. “We’re going to start to see that change. And everybody’s goal is to get on these [prescribed burn] projects just as quickly as possible.”

In the letter to employees dated Oct. 22, Deputy Regional Forester Kara Chadwick acknowledged this pause would affect accomplishments for the year but said, “The reality is that our national response capability is facing significant pressure for this time of year. Many of our resources are on emergency response outside the Region. We have a drawdown in resources both within and outside of the Region.”

The Forest Service emphasizes that its staff and equipment are shared nationally when needed. However, some prescribed fire advocates feel that cautious safeguarding means the agency will never be able to escape focusing on suppression in exchange for being proactive on forest resilience.

“They’re backed into a corner, but they’ve backed themselves into a corner,” Quinn-Davidson said. “They’re not leading, and it seems like they’re not capable of leading on prescribed fire, given the nature of politics and how they do business — always choosing short-term risk over long-term vision and strategy.”

She calls for a rethinking of how prescribed burns can be applied on federal lands.

“If the Forest Service is consistently not able to do the work, how can we lean on local resources — tribes and prescribed burn associations, for example — to get that work done?”