The Government Set a Colossal Wildfire. What Are Victims Owed? - The New York Times

Two prescribed burns got out of control, becoming New Mexico’s largest recorded wildfire.

— It started small, with a team of federal employees using drip torches to ignite a prescribed burn in the Santa Fe National Forest, aimed at thinning out dense pine woodlands.

The painful losses have created a backlash against the Forest Service and provided a pivotal test case for how the authorities react when a prescribed burn goes badly wrong.

Drawing on ancient fire management practices, federal and state officials are setting prescribed burns in forests where natural fires have been suppressed for decades, trying to thin out a buildup of vegetation that can fuel disastrous blazes.

The Forest Service, which already conducts about 4,500 prescribed fires each year, wants to aggressively ramp up operations nationwide.

Forest Service, announced a 90-day pause of prescribed fire operations on National Forest lands, giving officials time to study the program and how it has been carried out.

In an internal review of the burn set on April 6, Forest Service investigators found that fire managers had followed a plan within approved limits.

Representative Teresa Leger Fernández, a Democrat who represents the fire-plagued region of northern New Mexico in Congress, said she welcomed the administration’s moves to increase federal aid, and to take steps to mitigate potential flooding in national forests, which is critical as the Southwest’s monsoon season starts, bringing the danger of flooding and mudslides to the fire-scarred landscape.

Leger Fernández said she was furious to learn that the Forest Service had started both blazes.

The uncertainty stands in contrast to the reaction to a fire in 2000 that was set by the National Park Service and destroyed hundreds of homes in Los Alamos, N.M.

She said her family could have sold her father’s 360-acre ranch for several million dollars before the prescribed burns got out of control.

Moore, the Forest Service chief, declined to provide specific information about what his agency, part of the Department of Agriculture, could do to compensate victims.

The 90-day pause on prescribed burns ordered by Mr.

“We shouldn’t necessarily view one that escaped, even though it was destructive and massive, as a reason to end all prescribed burns,” said Rebecca Miller, a postdoctoral scholar with the University of Southern California’s West on Fire Project.

But even some who support thinning out forests lay the blame for this latest tragedy squarely on long-enduring Forest Service policies

He noted that in the 1890s, the forest around the river that is now designated as national forest was made up mostly of “old burns,” as well as meadows, open parks and barren peaks

Dearen said, after a long national policy of suppressing natural fires, that had skyrocketed to 1,089 trees per acre