Fuel breaks seen as wildfire control

SALT LAKE CITY — President Donald Trump’s administration is proposing a plan to slow Western wildfires by bulldozing, mowing or revegetating large swaths of land along 11,000 miles of terrain in the West.

The plan that was announced this summer and presented at public open houses, including one in Salt Lake City this week, 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. Some would completely clear land, others would mow down vegetation, and a third method would replant the area with more fire-resistant vegetation.

It would cost another $18 million to $107 million each year to maintain the strips and ensure vegetation doesn’t regrow on them.

The strips of land that would be 500 feet or less would be created along highways, rural roads and other areas already disturbed such as rights-of-way for pipelines, said Marlo Draper, the Bureau of Land Management’s supervisory project manager for the Idaho Great Basin team.

They won’t prevent fires, but they should reduce the costs of having to battle major blazes because fuel breaks reduce the intensity, flame length and 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.

“It gives us a chance to get in front of it and put fires out more quickly,” Draper said.

The plan is being criticized by at least one environmental group, which calls it an ill-conceived and expensive plan that has no scientific backing to show it will work.

While a U.S. Geological Survey report issued last year found that fuel breaks could be an important tool to reduce damage caused by wildfires, the agency cautioned that no scientific studies have been done to prove their effectiveness and that they could alter habitat for sagebrush plants and animal communities.

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% of the time.