Plan to slow wildfires would clear land

SALT LAKE CITY — The Trump administration is proposing an ambitious plan to slow Western wildfires by bulldozing, mowing or re-vegetating large swaths of land along 11,000 miles of terrain in the West.

The plan, which was recently announced and is being presented at public open houses, would create strips of land known as “fuel breaks” on about 1,000 square miles of land managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in an area known as the Great Basin in parts of Idaho, Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada and Utah.

The estimated cost would be about $55 million to $192 million, a wide range that illustrates the variance in costs for the different types of fuel breaks. It would cost another $18 million to $107 million each year to maintain the strips and ensure vegetation doesn’t regrow on the strips of land.

Wildfire experts say the program could help slow fires, but the breaks also might fragment wildlife habitat.

A U.S. Geological Survey report found fuel breaks could be an important tool to reduce damage caused by wildfires, but the agency cautioned that no scientific studies have been done to prove their effectiveness.

The Bureau of Land Management says it has done about 1,200 assessments of fuel breaks since 2002 and found they help control fires about 80 percent of the time.

The strips of land that would be 500 feet or less would be created along areas already disturbed such as rights of way for pipelines, said Marlo Draper, the bureau’s supervisory project manager for the Idaho Great Basin team.

They won’t prevent fires, but should reduce the costs of having to battle blazes because fuel breaks reduce the spread of fires and keep firefighters safe, Draper said.

It cost about $373 million over the past decade to fight 21 fires that were larger than 156 square miles on lands managed by the bureau in Utah, Nevada and Idaho, according to a report explaining the proposal.