WY - 2024 Worst Fire Year Since Huge Yellowstone Fires Of 1988; State GOP: Cut Property Taxes Funding Fire Response
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The fire threatening the Christian ranch would become known as the House Draw Fire, which grew into the largest blaze ever within Wyoming’s borders. In terms of acreage burned, 2024 was the second-largest wildfire season in Wyoming’s history, trailing only 1988, the year of the famous Yellowstone fires. By the end of 2024, Wyoming had amassed the fifth-most acres burned of any state, according to state data and estimates. Of the 32 fires that grew larger than 1,000 acres, almost half—including the three largest—burned in Wyoming’s northeast grasslands, predominantly on state and private land. Miraculously, the blazes didn’t kill anybody, but hundreds of Wyomingites evacuated their homes.
Last year’s fire season was less intense, but still above average in terms of acres burned. As legislators prepare to convene in Cheyenne next month for a legislative session, the pall of the 2024 wildfire season has spurred many constituencies across the state to ask for more funding to combat or prevent enormous blazes. And there are flickers of enthusiasm in the state legislature for changing how Wyoming fights fires, even as the ultra-conservative, climate change-denying Freedom Caucus wants to cut state spending. Gov. Mark Gordon and other lawmakers are taking calls from wildland firefighters for more resources seriously, but so far, state leaders’ proposed changes have not fully met counties’ proposals.
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In June, Shad Cooper and J.R. Fox, both county fire wardens, and Kelly Norris, head of Wyoming State Forestry, appeared in front of the Appropriations Committee to discuss the 2024 wildfire season. Four of the committee’s 11 lawmakers, all members of the Freedom Caucus, wore red blazers to highlight projections that Wyoming’s budget would be running a deficit within a few years. It was the trio’s first opportunity to speak publicly with lawmakers about the fiscal commitments Wyoming needed to make to better manage fire in a warming world. Their testimony was sobering. Wyoming’s Emergency Fire Suppression Account, which helps counties cover the cost of fighting fire, had hovered around $100,000 after its inception in 1986, but has skyrocketed to over $52 million since 2003. The state’s limited human resources were also stretched thin: Despite managing over 32 million acres of land, the Wyoming State Forestry Division is among the lowest-staffed forestry agencies in the West, and the department routinely loses personnel to federal agencies with better pay and benefits, Norris said. Nearly 90 percent of fire departments in Wyoming are staffed with volunteers who are having to respond to more and longer-duration fires. The dangerous working conditions and long hours are increasingly having a negative impact on the firefighters’ families and social lives.
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A third of volunteer firefighters in Wyoming are over 50, and Cooper noted fewer young people have been volunteering in the last five years. “That reduction scares me, and I think it should scare everyone in the state of Wyoming,” he said. Without younger personnel, he said Wyoming would “have more large wildland fires because they escape and we’re not able to keep them small.” Wyoming has another source of low-cost firefighting in addition to its volunteer departments. The state relies extensively on an inmate crew to fight wildfires for “a couple bucks an hour,” Fox said, and lawmakers expressed enthusiasm for expanding that program. Norris wouldn’t disclose inmates’ salary when asked by Inside Climate News, but said Wyoming more than doubled their pay, and it is currently more than $2 an hour. Even if that program were to grow, it can’t keep up with the forecasted increase in wildfire in the state.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19012026/wyoming-prepares-for-future-after-record-wildfire-season/