Nature's own forest fires would be allowed to burn largely unchecked again in Yellowstone National Park and 30 other federal wilderness areas and parks, under revised regulations being approved by the National Park Service.
Within the next month, the Park Service will unveil a policy for Yellowstone that would permit wildfires to burn in 90 percent of the Wyoming park's forests. But the wildfires would be closely monitored and extinguished if they threatened to get out of hand.Prior to the the fire-plagued summer of 1988, the Park Service had a similar "let-it-burn" policy regarding naturally occurring forest fires. But after the blazes charred one-third of the park's 2.25 million acres, the policy was scrapped and firefighters have been quickly putting out all of Yellowstone's fires, both wild and man-made.
The new rules for Yellowstone will prohibit most fires near inhabited areas, roads and power lines, said Terry Danforth, the park's chief of fire emergency.
"We're going to monitor fires daily to make sure they don't get out of control," Danforth said. "And we're going to be very careful about fires that start early in the summer season. If we decide a fire is getting worrisome, we're going to rush people in and suppress it."
Danforth said Yellowstone's wildfires became a raging inferno in 1988 because the fire season began in early June of a summer that was bone dry and very windy.
"There wasn't anything anyone could do to stop 1988's fires," he recalled. Approximately 700,000 acres burned, including 20,000 that lost all vestiges of plant and animal life.
Yellowstone's new policy will require stamping out all man-made blazes, even if they're in remote wilderness areas where natural fires are permitted, Park Service Fire Management Chief Elmer Hurd said.
"If it's a man-caused fire, it's not nature's way and we're going to put it out," he explained.
The new rules also allow Park Service employees to deliberately ignite fires to burn tinder dry underbrush and fallen trees.
Hurd said similar fire plans have been approved during the past two years for 11 Park Service reservations. They are Dinosaur National Monument, Utah and Colo.; Saguaro National Park, Ariz.; Death Valley, Sequoia-Kings Canyon and Yosemite national parks, Calif.; Everglades National Park, Fla.; Voyageurs National Park, Minn.; Glacier National Park, Mont.; Carlsbad Caverns, N.M.; North Cascades National Park, Wash.; and Grand Teton National Park, Wyo.
Another 20 national parks are also in line for policies that will allow closely monitored wildfires, Hurd said.
"Fire is nature's way of cleaning up fallen trees and underbrush, " he added. "If we don't allow fire to do its job, we're negligent in our management. But it's also part of our job to have a highly efficient fire suppression system in case we need it. And we have it."
The Park Service's return to its let-it-burn policy is supported by former critic Derrick Crandall, president of the National Recreation Coalition.
"We're happy to let bygones be bygones," Crandall said. "The Park Service was very indecisive and didn't handle the 1988 Yellowstone fires very well, but we support its reliance on natural fires to preserve the park's ecosystem."
Yellowstone's new policy also was praised by the Sierra Club Regional Director, Larry Mehlhaff of Sheridan, Wyo.
"The Park Service needed to go back to the natural burn policy in Yellowstone," he said. "There's no reason to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to save trees that should burn. That's nature's way of renewing the park's habitat."