The U.S. Forest Service is moving forward with a plan to roughly double the acreage for prescribed burns across the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest.
Forest Supervisor Emily Platt says before humans developed the land, roughly 100,000 acres of the forest in west-central Montana burned every year. But human fire suppression efforts have cut that number by more than half.
“Wildfires are really good at removing small trees and surface fuels and creating some openings and pockets," Platt says. "And all of those things help mitigate future fires, they dampen the behavior of future fires”
That means overgrown brush and excess tree debris are creating precarious conditions in the 2.3 million acre national forest, Platt says.
The new forestwide plan would implement prescribed burns on roughly 40,000 acres annually through 2045. The goal is to reduce the amount of kindling that could feed a catastrophic wildfire in the future.
Designated wilderness and research areas are excluded from prescribed burning.
The Forest Service has completed an environmental assessment and hopes to begin work later this fall. Crews will start with project sites in the Elkhorn Mountains and on the middle fork of the Judith River.
The U.S. Forest Service has more information about the plan.
