ST. GEORGE — Despite the warming weather, the official start of wildfire season is still two months away. 

But during a U.S. Senate hearing in Washington D.C. on Thursday, David Fogerson, Nevada’s chief of emergency management, told attendees,  “We no longer have a fire season, but rather a fire year. The idea of a fire season lasting from May to October is not reality in today’s world. We see fire year-round.”

Federal, state and Utah officials concur with this notion, and the topic was discussed during a hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The hearing covered the results of a commission partially created by both a senator and a congressman from Utah to study new measures to prevent and fight wildfires in places like the forests and grasslands of Southern Utah. 

The Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission was included in the 2021 Infrastructure Act after it was introduced by Sens. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, as well as Rep. John Curtis, R-Utah. 

“Utah, like much of the West, has experienced devastating wildfires in recent years. I believe modern technologies and active forest management will help wildland firefighters and communities,” Curtis said in an e-mail to St. George News. “Ultimately, we no longer have a singular fire season. I am pleased that Utah’s state and local leaders put a strong emphasis on tackling these issues and we can work together to ensure first responders have the adequate technology to tackle mitigation year-round.”

Curtis is running to replace the retiring Romney in the upcoming elections.

Members of the commission, speaking to the senators Thursday, emphasized mitigation such as prescribed burns and selective brush and wood removal before wildfire season as a way to lessen the severity of brush fires. 

Locals could see evidence of these efforts on Wednesday, as Santa Clara-Ivins Fire & Rescue said a large prescribed burn in the Kayenta area made smoke visible in the sky.

Experts also emphasized more investment in local fire departments they say are the “first line of defense” before federal and Bureau of Land Management firefighters arrive. They cautioned that smoke-increasing wildfires are creating air quality issues in other areas – like smokey skies seen over Southern Utah in the last few years.  

“It is a national priority. I recognize that we can’t keep on doing the way we have in the past. We’re going to have to have some changes,” Romney said during the hearing. “It’s going to require additional funding. We may need additional fixed-wing aircraft, different monitoring systems, different remediation, different forestry management, different prescribed burns processes. There are a lot of things that we are going to have to do differently than we have in the past.”

Jamie Barnes, the Utah State Forester and Director of the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands, cited the massive fire last August that mostly destroyed the Maui neighborhood of Lahaina and the continuing blazes in the panhandle of Texas that are the largest in that state’s history as examples of the “increased severity and intensity of fires outside of the typical fire season.” 

She said that a “Utah way” of agencies working together with prescribed burns and planning before the fires and good communication during events could be helpful nationwide. 

“We believe in strong interagency collaboration, along with shared decision-making and leveraging respective agency mandates and projects. Shared stewardship and fire sense are examples of how the Utah way achieves goals across the landscape on the state’s public and private lands and allows for advancement of landscape-scale efforts and state-wide prevention campaigns.”

Barnes said the removal of dead trees and brush should be a part of those mitigation efforts but warned that red tape is getting in the way. 

“Permitting in Utah gets held up in litigation,” Barnes said. 

Romney noted that getting the logging industry involved isn’t a bad thing.

“Having driven through a number of the forests in our state, I was astounded to see that in some cases, perhaps as much as two-thirds of the of the wood of the trees are dead. And if they’re harvested, I’m told within three years or so, they can be used for chipboard and so forth,” Romney said. “The process of getting a permit to harvest this dead wood takes so long that it’s no longer useful and therefore has no economic value.”

As for when the fires actually take place, Fogerson said because of the smoke issue, a wildfire in California or Nevada can still be an issue in Utah, as the heavy smoke drifts there and affects air quality.

“It seems like every summer now we are socked in smoke,” Fogerson said.

He said the spread of a brush fire and the movement of smoke should have more urgency as far as emergency management is concerned. 

“We need to treat fire with a hurricane approach. We need the opening of emergency cooperation centers, consequence management like hurricanes,” Fogerson said, adding that the monitoring of smoke in rural areas like those in Southern Utah is lacking.

“Urban areas have smoke monitors. Rural areas like Nevada, Utah don’t and we need them to let people know what measures they need to take,” Fogerson said. “We need to upgrade smoke as a disaster declaration.”

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