I promised some posts about what other interest areas are doing with issues related to ours. Given the discussion about the recent Road 203 fire in Nebraska, an escaped prescribed fire.
The Chokecherry prescribed fire on the Bessey Ranger District of the Nebraska National Forest was declared a wildfire at approximately 4p.m. March 12, 2026. Although forecasted weather conditions were within parameters for the implementation of the prescribed fire, the wind event that took place 36 hours after ignitions ceased caused a spot fire that spread outside the project boundary.
Note: you may be reading about the Nebraska wildfires in general, and the Road 203 fire according to Inciweb as of 2 hours ago was 35, 814 acres with 0% contained.
Operations were limited yesterday due to cold weather conditions; however, fire managers were able to assess the fire perimeter and evaluate current conditions. While there is snow on the ground in some areas, heat is still present in the duff, and creeping fire behavior has been observed within the fire perimeter. Groups of cedar trees in some areas of the fire are also still retaining heat.
Yesterday, firefighters began utilizing UAS (drones) equipped with infrared technology to identify hotspots. This information is relayed to crews on the ground to quickly access and efficiently extinguish those areas of heat. There will be two UAS platforms in use today to continue this direct extinguishment strategy.
It probably seems weird to people outside the Great Plains but we can have fires with snow on the ground.
Anyway, that is not the big Nebraska wildfire you might read about in the news, which is the Morrill fire which is (from Inciweb as I type this) 572,804 acres.
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We’ve discussed the issue of building trust here several times, and THW talks about trust in this post on his Substack.
The public knows prescribed fire is beneficial and needed, but a small number of mistakes, some which grow to large incidents, leave a yearly bad taste in the public’s mouth for operations like this. And with that, public trust wanes.
The amount of positive and successful burns and prescribed fires that have already occurred this year are in the hundreds if not thousands. But as we know, this does not make national news, and even the agencies sometimes forget to advertise the countless good wins they have. Why? Because they have a job to do, on to the next one.
Insane amounts of good results have been completed quietly in the background of everyone’s daily grind.
Believe me when I say that both wildland firefighters and management do everything they can to prevent things like this from happening. Has there ever been fire put on the ground when there was some apprehension in the air?
Of course, I would be lying if I said otherwise. But this is a workforce that lives and breathes “we can do this.”
There is also pressure from the “fuels and lands” side of the barn to get acres completed. Who makes the final call?
This topic is an elephant in the room, and policy changes are coming to at least some of the agencies. A report is expected soon on the Dragon Bravo Fire from last year, and will hopefully paint a clearer picture of this dynamic.
Of course, when I read this, I thought about the basics of transparency and accountability. Of course, particularly transparency. As Tim says, successful prescribed fires don’t make the news. And then I thought about a PF dashboard, which would have all federal, state, and local (and NGO) prescribed fire acres, seasons, pre-treatments and so on. Why couldn’t the feds initiate such a thing?
Let’s look at two recent “improving reporting-ease of access” efforts.
One is at FDA:
“The FDA’s previous adverse event reporting systems were outdated and fragmented and made important data difficult to access. These clunky systems also wasted millions of taxpayer dollars and created blind spots in our postmarket surveillance of products ranging from drugs and vaccines to cosmetics,” said FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, M.D., M.P.H. “We’re fixing the problem through a major modernization initiative. Starting today, the FDA will have a single, intuitive adverse event platform that will better serve agency scientists, researchers, and the public.”
In the past, the agency processed approximately 6 million adverse event reports per year across a patchwork of seven databases, which were expensive and had a poor user interface, making searches difficult. These platforms collectively cost the agency approximately $37 million per year to operate. Given the efficiencies of AEMS, the agency expects to save approximately $120 million over the next five years. The agency also expects the new searchable system to significantly reduce agency FOIA requests for unreleased adverse event reports, given that AEMS will publish reports in real time, rather than quarterly.
That’s improving access to the public (including reporters) as well as making it easier for users to enter information.
Another is at USDA
‘One Farmer, One File’ prevents our farmers from duplicating tasks while increases their productivity and time in the field.”
USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA), Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and Risk Management Agency (RMA) work with agricultural producers on a wide range of programs and services, from establishing a farm number to reporting acres planted, and from getting capital to recovering from disasters.
The goal of “One Farmer, One File” is to reduce the administrative burden for farmers. Additionally, this effort will make program delivery more efficient, save time for USDA staff, and decrease spending on disparate information technology systems.
The “One Farmer, One File” initiative is part of a broad modernization effort to unify all FSA, NRCS and RMA systems. This uniformed system will retire legacy systems and remove agency silos. USDA began work on this system in 2025 and plans to greatly advance the effort in 2026. USDA anticipates completing the project in 2028.
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To the USWFS folks and the FS:
INCIWeb is great! Why can’t we have a prescribed fire dashboard?
I think there are a couple things going astray on the PF side of things; one is the lackadaisical approval process on the RO’s, when PF parameters are outside the burn plan, and another is FS officials thumbing their noses at the complaints of too much smoke impacting the public! That’s two, there are many more but I’ll focus on just these two.
When a PF burn plan is drawn up and approved, there are specific sets of weather variables, staffing, smoke, etc that are to be used as “go/no go” decisions on the ground. All the while, you have RO types (and SO staffs) telling the Forest Sup and Rx burn bosses “more, better, faster, we have targets and dollars at play here”…. I saw this myself as a burn boss and as a Forest Sup, when conditions would make one hesitant to light a blowtorch. Add in the lack of accountability for bad decisions and you have a recipe for continued bad news. When I was burning in Region 6, we were told if we screwed up, we would be looking for another occupation! That will make one “check the checkers”.
Smoke? There are many fine programs developed that actually do a pretty good job of smoke forecasting. I used HYSPLIT, and required the fire shop to use it on our burns. They didn’t like that, at the time, but if we were talking the talk of best available science, HYSPLIT was it! And, even though it’s not that hard to run the programs (at that time) the National Weather Service would run it for them. However, doesn’t do any good utilizing any of the smoke forecasting tools if you don’t care about downstream effects. And I tell ya, folks in the South are beginning to make a stink over so much smoke being poured into towns and communities, day after day, after day!
Burning pasture lands on a Grassland (USFS) and calling it hazardous fuels reduction helped get the FS into this mess, along with clueless decision makers in the PF program……
Jim, here’s what I don’t understand. It seems like many of these escapes come from unexpected winds. Are the wind predictions not accurate enough, or is it too difficult to shut the fire down in a short period of time?
Like, why, in your experience, might it not happen that a PF is going on, folks get notified the wind conditions are changing, and then put it out before the winds show up?
Thanks!
Well, yes….🤠. My experience is that most escapes happen after the burn is complete; 24-48 hrs after the firing is done. And rightfully so; I think it’s more to do with lackadaisical monitoring than anything else. I/we have had anything from a couple acres to over 9,000 acres in a grass fire with winds of 60 + mph the next day.
For actual blown weather predictions, they are generally pretty accurate. The only one I’m familiar with, I was the burn boss and we had an accurate prediction of a wind shift, burning grasslands in a square section (640 acres) in eastern Colorado. Predictions were spot on, timing was off by about six hours. We had lit completed on two sides, burning against the wind, when I looked up and saw the column bend back over the unburned portion – the race was on to burn ahead of the wind shift and catch the fire. We had about a four acre slop over but it could’ve gotten a bit more exciting.
As for pressure to burn, the burn boss has the final word. I’ve had a staff officer telling me to keep burning, while the safety officer advised pulling the plug. I pulled the plug! We burned very large blocks in the South (up to 8,000 acres/day) with aerial ignitions, but generally had intermediate control points we could cut it off if we had to.
We’ve come along way from the “crash/thump” method of fuels receptiveness of the past….
The prescribed burning for choke cherry control should have been postponed! Local weather conditions at the time of the burn may have been acceptable but we are having one of our driest winters on record. Driving down the highways over the last several months I have never seen so many burn patches in ditches mostly caused by discarded cigarettes. It should have been deemed to dry. I have camped and riden atvs at the nebraska national forest and several years ago half of it burned abd had not been replanted and I fear this will be the end for it since it sounds like the rest of it has burned. Sad!
I agree, it would be great to have a prescribed fire dashboard. It’s also important for public affairs specialists to be advocates for telling the prescribed fire stories and to get reporters out on some of the burns. I would pester people to get the word out. It didn’t always make me popular with some of the employees, but the public and local media appreciated it. Unfortunately, it appears public affairs specialists positions aren’t always being filled anymore after they have been vacated, at least that was the word I got after the person who filled in behind me retired.
Hi Mike, I just want to elaborate on your comment regarding vacant public affairs specialists. At least locally, many of recently (within last the 5 years) created public affairs positions were vacated within the past year. Some specialists felt that early messaging from the new administration was pretty clear that there was going to be no need for them and elected to take the DRP.
Remaining specialists have had their scope significantly curtailed. In some (many/all?) cases they are limited to only sharing social media content pushed out from the WO or USDA. They are allowed to publish posts on projects (signed/open for comment/etc.), job announcements, and for public safety (wildfire, Rx, avalanche), but not really engage beyond that. Occasionally this results in tone deaf posts like keeping water nearby your winter fire when locally it is below freezing and there is a foot or so of snow. I don’t think posts like that build confidence in the agency with the public.
There is no longer an ability to highlight local trails, features, recreation opportunities, etc. Public meetings on projects have also been cancelled as forests couldn’t agree to terms set out by the RO/WO.
Thanks for that update. That was pretty much what I was hearing, but didn’t know how widespread it was. Very discouraging.
My experience in contacting people has been positive. Every public affairs person on a Forest has gotten back to me promptly with the info I request.
Only one forest needed to check with the Region for answers (and I don’t have other examples from that Region). And the forests I follow have plenty of info on their X feeds – and I don’t see anything USDA-originated on them. Of course that has something to do with wildfire.
Example from the HT https://x.com/HumboldtToiyabe/status/2036074876235288588?s=20
From the post …“The public knows prescribed fire is beneficial and needed“.
I disagree with this unsupported premise. Prescribed fire and thinning are both forms of geoengineering. Despite “studies” that support these landscape scale projects, the far reaching implications are not – cannot – be assessed. Climate, soil microbiology, wildlife impacts… We are – literally- playing with fire, with little understanding of our impact.