A Bureau of Land Management plan to control giant wildfires with 11,000 miles of fire fuel breaks is drawing questions among some wildfire specialists, Bobby Magill writes.
- The agency wants to clear fire fuel breaks—strips of land on which vegetation and debris have been reduced—across public lands in six Western states. Under the BLM’s preferred option, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island could be cleared with herbicides, bulldozers, mowers, grazing or intentionally set fire across the Great Basin in Utah, Nevada, Idaho, California, Washington, and Oregon.
- A U.S. Geological Survey report calls new fuel breaks “a ...