The Fires We Light—and the Acres We Don’t Count
Dana Tibbitts | National Wildfire Alliance
Federal agencies deliberately ignite vast areas of forest in the name of wildfire suppression. A major National Wildfire Alliance investigation exposes how these fires escape separate acreage accounting—and the environmental consequences we still cannot measure.
The federal government is setting fires inside America’s wildfires.
Thousands of acres are deliberately ignited by firefighters using drip torches, helicopters, and drones. These intentional burns become part of the nation’s official wildfire acreage totals, without a separate national accounting of how much land firefighters themselves burned.
This is established federal firefighting practice, known as suppression firing. The rationale is familiar: Fight fire with fire. Burn the fuel ahead of an advancing wildfire, and the approaching flames may have nowhere left to go.
But what happens when the fire deliberately set to stop a wildfire consumes thousands of additional acres? What happens to the old-growth forests, wildlife habitat, soils, and watersheds in its path? And who determines whether the operation saved the land—or unnecessarily burned more of it?
At the heart of this investigation is a question federal wildfire agencies have never adequately answered:
How much of the land burned in America’s wildfires was consumed by the advancing fire—and how much was deliberately burned in the name of stopping it?
That question drives a major September 2026 investigation by Frank Carroll, Vice President of the National Wildfire Alliance (NWA), titled Suppression Firing: Counting the Acres Burned on Purpose.
Federal agencies possess increasingly sophisticated technology to ignite fire across enormous landscapes, yet lack a corresponding national system to account for the acreage and consequences of those operations.
The findings raise fundamental questions about wildfire statistics on which national policy, scientific research, and billions in public spending depend.
The Acres That Disappear Into The Statistics
The magnitude of the practice may surprise Americans who assume firefighters are primarily extinguishing fires, not deliberately setting new ones.
An Australian study of large wildfires in Victoria found suppression firing accounted for an average of 29 percent of the final burned area on fires where the operations could be mapped. On one fire, intentional ignition accounted for an extraordinary 94 percent.
These findings cannot be extrapolated to American wildfires. But they demonstrate how much deliberate burning can contribute to what ultimately appears on official maps as wildfire damage.
How much of America’s reported wildfire acreage results from the same practice?
Nobody knows.
Carroll examined federal National Incident Feature Service archives for 2022 through 2025. Among more than 106,000 distinct completed fireline features, only 1,128 were identified as completed burnouts.
In 2024, just 105 of 988 incidents with mapped firelines included any mapped burnout. In 2025, only 109 of 1,865 did.
These sparse records contrast sharply with federal firefighting doctrine, which describes backfiring as customary during indirect attack.
Worse, burnouts are generally mapped as lines, not areas. Almost none contain the width measurements needed to calculate acreage.
What appears to be a single wildfire footprint may actually combine a naturally or accidentally ignited wildfire with extensive deliberate government ignition operations.
Those are different activities. America’s national wildfire accounting does not adequately distinguish them.
A New Age Of Aerial Ignition
Meanwhile, the technology for lighting fires is advancing rapidly.
Helicopters dispense incendiary spheres or spray burning gelled gasoline across vegetation. Drones deliver hundreds of ignition devices in precisely spaced patterns, including at night and in dangerous terrain.
These tools offer genuine safety advantages, reducing dangerous helicopter missions and exposure for ground crews. But their expanding use demands scrutiny.
According to Forest Service figures examined by NWA, drone ignition treated 128,913 acres in fiscal 2023 and 188,986 acres in fiscal 2024—a 47 percent increase.
The number of incendiary spheres dropped more than doubled, from 322,246 to 733,115.
Those acreage figures do not separately identify wildfire suppression firing versus prescribed burning—the very distinction Carroll’s investigation seeks to establish.
The agencies can count aircraft hours, ignition devices, and acres treated by drones. Yet they do not publish comprehensive figures identifying how much intentional fire is added to active wildfire perimeters.
We have developed remarkable precision in delivering fire without demanding comparable precision in measuring its consequences.
One Fire, Two Sets Of Rules
Perhaps the most revealing finding involves the dramatically different oversight requirements governing intentional fire.
A prescribed burn requires an approved written plan, formal authorization, weather and smoke considerations, contingency procedures, environmental compliance, and monitoring.
But introduce essentially the same fire during an active wildfire, and the rules change.
Federal firing-operations curriculum permits a dynamic, informal plan during wildfire suppression. Decisions to conduct burnouts may be made at the single-resource-boss level.
There is no equivalent national requirement to map deliberately burned acreage, systematically measure ecological effects, or provide prescribed-fire-level documentation.
Consider the implications.
The same forest. The same fuel. The same firefighter. The same ignition device.
Yet profoundly different standards of planning, oversight, and accountability.
Smoke generated by intentional firing becomes part of the wildfire smoke burden without separate attribution. Resource protection relies heavily on incident-level judgment. An escaped burnout does not automatically generate the incident record and mandatory review associated with an escaped prescribed fire.
This is a structural blind spot in the oversight of large-scale government ignition.
The Ecological Cost No One Can Measure
The unanswered questions extend far beyond acreage.
Wildfires do not necessarily consume everything within their boundaries. Terrain, weather, moisture, and fuel conditions can leave surviving vegetation—natural refuges that shelter wildlife, preserve seed sources, and help forests recover.
Suppression firing deliberately consumes fuel between an advancing fire and a containment line. Depending on its execution, it may burn areas the wildfire would otherwise have spared.
Research establishes that ignition patterns affect flame length, spread rate, heat exposure, and combustion duration. These factors influence soils, roots, vegetation, and the survival of large, old trees.
Yet Carroll found no controlled field study directly comparing fuel consumption inside mapped wildfire burnouts with comparable free-spreading fire on the same incident. Nor does the national emissions inventory identify how much smoke originates from deliberate firefighter ignition.
Some firing operations have been associated with reduced measured fire severity. But those findings do not resolve what happens beneath the canopy, where prolonged heating can consume organic layers and damage roots.
How much surviving habitat is lost? How much smoke is deliberately generated? How much watershed degradation, soil damage, or delayed tree mortality results? And how often does the acreage burned actually improve containment?
Without distinguishing the deliberately ignited fire from the advancing wildfire, the full costs and benefits cannot be reliably established.
Count The Fire We Light
NWA’s investigation does not argue that all suppression firing should cease. It recognizes legitimate tactical and safety purposes. Nor does it claim every deliberately burned acre would otherwise have escaped the wildfire.
Instead, it demands something fundamental.
Count the acres deliberately burned. Record when, where, and why ignition occurs. Preserve operational decisions. Distinguish suppression firing from prescribed burning and free-spreading wildfire. Measure ecological consequences.
Much of the necessary technology already exists.
Annual wildfire acreage totals inform national policy, management evaluations, research, and public expenditures. Yet if an unknown share of those acres was intentionally ignited by the agencies managing the fires, the statistics are missing a critical part of the story.
The National Wildfire Alliance has placed an essential question before the American public:
How much of the land burned in America’s wildfires was consumed by the advancing fire—and how much was deliberately burned in the name of stopping it?
Until agencies answer, the public cannot fully assess decisions being made in the name of wildfire suppression.
The fires are being lit. The acres are being burned. The consequences are real, even where their extent remains unknown.
The public deserves to know not merely how many acres burned, but who set them burning, why, and what those decisions accomplished.
Because when we fight fire with fire, we must also account for the fire we fight with.
Based on Frank Carroll’s September 21, 2026 research report, “Suppression Firing: Counting the Acres Burned on Purpose,” prepared for the National Wildfire Alliance — Research for Transparency in Government.
National Wildfire Alliance | nationalwildfirealliance.org
