It’s starting to feel like fall here. The monsoons have started. And if you look at Inciweb, you easily find wildfires with estimated containment dates at the end of October. You might read stories like this, (and the same story has turned up in many outlets) creatively eliding the 10AM policy with the stated goals of full suppression or aggressive initial attack. It is true that some of us want the 10AM policy back, but exactly what does that mean? Does the “10AM policy” mean the same thing to everyone? And what is actually happening this fire year with the full suppression and aggressive initial attack approach? Since I can’t keep up with the terminology changes, and I think the term “beneficial fire” unhelpfully elides prescribed and WFU, I’ll just use WFU for now to mean what some people call Managed Fire (all wildfires are managed) or Wildfire for Resource Benefits or whatever.
Let’s take a look at one of today’s current wildfires (as of Aug. 27), the Upper Smith Fire on the Idaho Panhandle Forest:
The Northern Idaho Blue Team assumed command of the fire on August 12, 2026, at 6:00 am. A full suppression strategy will continue to be implemented utilizing direct and indirect tactics to protect critical values at-risk and minimize firefighter risk exposure.
Yesterday it was 30% contained and had 96 people on it, with an estimated containment date of 10/31/2026.
-Monitor and patrol H-2, north and downslope, through the avalanche chute and east along Smith Creek, using ground and aerial resources.
-Patrol DP-17 to above H-5 into burn scar. Patrol line from DP-17 to sling 2, sling 1, into Smith Creek. Patrol spot fires east of sling 2.
-Aerial resources will continue to check fire spread as it moves across the Parker Ridge fire scar.
-Continue to fine tune structure protection and prep the Westside Road for possible firing operation.
-Scout west into Smith Creek and look for opportunities for point protection on critical values.
-Patrol and monitor around associated values at risk from increased fire activity.
-assess ability to contain new starts within the TFR.
-continue to monitor and patrol for new starts and holdovers.
-Support the suppression of new fires within the TFR.
What are the conditions?
The fire is burning in mature mixed conifer with moderate to high loadings of 1000-hr fuels and deep duff layers. Fuels in Long Canyon Fire 2022 and Parker 2015 burn scars include snags, dead and downed woody debris, and conifer regeneration. Fuels in the Long Canyon Fire 2022 burn scar include a slash/blowdown fuel model and pockets of shrubs. Fuel moisture in 1000-hr fuels is 12-14%.
I’m not a wildfire person, but it sounds like a sensible approach. Note that they are monitoring and doing point protection within the overall strategy of full suppression.
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Maybe the real issue is “when and how much WFU, and who decides?” This was a bad fire year, so maybe this wasn’t the year? Or maybe in some windowless cubicle farm in the bowels of Interior, some group is dreaming up a better way to go about it and build more public support. I
If I listen to some of the voices on the “not ever” side, I hear concerns about the way decisions are made to engage in WFU. Maybe implicit in that is the difference in public engagement and environmental analysis between major vegetation manipulation categories. For older folks, this is another incarnation of the old tension “should there ever be NEPA for wildfire management?”; “when is wildfire an emergency, and when not?”?
If we look at this handy table (last years below)
We find that the Forest Service FY 2025 Oct 1, 2024 to Sept 30, 2025, did 867,764 acres of WFU, actually twice as much as 2024. So it looks like the FS did over twice as much WFU in 2025 as 2024 (868k vs. 362K). From the outside, then, assuming these numbers are as close to correct as the FS and DOI have, it looks like WFU was increased during the first year of the Trump Admin by over 2x. Granted that the Admin did not start till January, and maybe lots of WFU happened between 10/01/2024 and January.
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When I hear Frank Carroll talking about his concerns, I hear the idea that “if it’s intentional and it’s supposed to be good, why don’t we measure its goodness (and decide on what that is) and fund it through non-emergency funds?” It’s hard to disagree with that formulation, or is it?
Then there’s the question of “if you need a CE to harvest 70 acres (and this CE was litigated!), why you don’t need any NEPA to intentionally burn potentially hundreds of acres.” Well, you do if it’s prescribed, but not if it’s WFU. This seems like a bit of a NEPA gap, and maybe folks should pick a lane as to whether it’s intentional or not. Everyone who follow TSW knows that I am not a fan of Forest Plans and the current planning rule. But WFU pre-decisions have been made in forest plans and amendments, so it does seem like a particularly useful thing to do in Plans.
To circle back to Roadless, one problem I have with the rescission idea is that land allocations should be made in forest plans. This one of those concepts that may sound good in theory, but in practice, forest planning is lengthy and often held up by litigation, and potentially too expensive and unwieldy for that to actually work in practice. Just think of all those assessments where FS employees calculated NRV and all that.. only to find that a couple hundred thousand acres is not in the condition they assessed and it’s already out of date. Still, given all that, I’ve argued for a long time that the FS should cease revisions until fire management amendments are up to speed.
At some point, we would understand the desired future conditions of some landscape, and then could assess whether any specific WFU was successful at moving toward those conditions.
But backing way up to the Three Horizons Framework, perhaps WFU as currently constituted with the inherent fuzziness on emergency applicability for NEPA and funding, is simply the equivalent of an H2 technology, as Google AI tells me:
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- H2 Capture: Governments often use H2 technology simply to extend the life of an outdated H1 system rather than transforming it.
“Just think of all those assessments where FS employees calculated NRV and all that.. only to find that a couple hundred thousand acres is not in the condition they assessed and it’s already out of date.” I think this misapprehends the NRV concept. NRV, as a forest plan desired condition, is based on historic conditions (mostly) and projected future conditions (in which I think current conditions are not a major player). It doesn’t seem to me that finding a changed condition in a lot of acres would necessarily invalidate the NRV in the forest plan.
I worked on the 1985 planning rule (remember that one?), which was where the idea of putting specific desired conditions into the forest plan, instead of figuring them out for every project, first arose. The idea was that, conceptually, desired conditions are a forest plan decision because once you figure them out for an ecosystem, they would apply to multiple future projects and places. Finding something different on the ground normally just changes what you do to get to that desired condition. If that difference warrants amending the plan’s desired condition because of some unique site situation, that could be done, but under the 2012 Rule’s bland consistency requirements for desired conditions, this doesn’t seem like it would ever be necessary.
Shouldn’t the plan actions take you from current conditions to future desired conditions? How can it do that if it doesn’t know what current conditions are?
Current conditions are relevant to objectives – to move current conditions towards desired conditions. I don’t think being wrong about objectives is a fatal flaw, given how aspirational (and funding-limited) they are. (I’ve argued that they shouldn’t even be plan components.)
The Upper Smith Fire is a really poor example for characterization of WFU or Managed Fire. Full suppression with intent to keep the impacts and footprint as minimal as possible has been the goal from the onset. To my knowledge, there has never been any discussion of “Resource Benefits.” The local community, local Forest Service staff, and IMTs have no interest in it for that area.
IMTs prior to the Blue Team were so intent on keeping the size as small as they could, that they continually implemented low probability of success actions, instead of better long-term options. Inevitably, the low probability actions didn’t hold so here we are a month later.
My interpretation of an October or November containment date is that the fire is large enough that it is impractical to grid the footprint for all heats or smoke, and so it is possible that smoke may be visible at some point in the fall. This is common in mountainous timbered country where it isn’t practical to chase smoldering stump holes a half mile from the line, even if the team wants all ‘political smokes’ out. A fall containment date doesn’t equate to WFU. On the ground, this is not a benefits fire, that said, I don’t know if someone will eventually classify it as WFU.
I didn’t say it was WFU. I said “many acres will be burned under full suppression strategies, not consciously for Resource Benefit, but because.. that’s what makes sense. My point was that the argument “we need to do WFU because prescribed can’t do enough alone” doesn’t take into account fuel reduction from teams using the the usual tactics under full suppression strategies.
Bobcat Lakes and Sand Creek Fires would lend more support to both your statement and point.
WFU and Rx Fire often include more than only fuel reduction objectives. And that argument could certainly include regular acres from full suppression tactics if one wanted.
Hi Sharon–
One important terminology clarification, agency acres that are claimed as part of treated acres are not WFU. They are acres burned in a wildfire that met forest plan and/or project objectives. Calling that WFU acres conflates the management strategy with assessment of the outcomes. We can have acres claimed as meeting those objectives that were burned under all possible strategies.
I know we don’t make this easy on ourselves, but if we don’t work on our terminology somewhere…
Thanks as always for all that you do to promote thoughtful conversations.
I do think that ‘acres burned that meet plan objectives’ deserves its own statistical category, for better or for worse. That way we can compare it to the full footprint of each wildfire. Of course, it would also be important to spell out what those plan objectives are. In detail.
“Resource benefits” are often of dubious value, when you factor in the ‘bad results’ on the same fire.
Dana, thanks so much for this! Improving clarity is always appropriate and welcome. It seems to me that my own field, silviculture, and wildfire both can use words that only experts understand.
It also seems to me that fire folks are always learning (a learning organization!) so it seems to me that they would want to keep track of total prescribed fire acres, acres burned that met prescription; total WFU acres burned, acres burned in …that met forest plan or project objectives.., total Non-WFU Acres Burned (not WFU intention), Non-WFU acres that met forest plan or project objectives.
Now project objectives may be clear, but many acres are burned outside of projects. Given my experience with the specificity of different Forest Plans, I wonder what goes into that determination.. do people visit the acres, and do they document for each fire, how exactly those acres meet which forest plan DCs or objectives? What exactly is the decision process, and who is involved.
This seems like an argument for me for Wildfire Forest Plan Amendments that make all this clearer. Why I think this is important is that it sometimes seems like wildfire people (or line officers) may communicate the safety or WFU line as somewhat blurry. And that will matter a great deal as tech improves and maybe firefighter safety does not provide the same kind of rationale.
Yes, I was also going to ask about how “meeting objectives” works. Bring in forest plan monitoring as well. And it’s not clear to me what kind of “project” we would be talking about. How does this differ between prescribed fire, wildfire use or just wildfires (can you just meet project “objectives” made up during or after an unplanned fire)?