A Decade-Old Fuel Break in McCarthy, Alaska: Is It Still Working?

Setting up a terrestrial lidar scanner at a monitoring plot. Jennifer McMillan, NPS.

The remote community of McCarthy, Alaska, sits in boreal forest inside Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve.

The fuel break

In 2011, the National Park Service and the State of Alaska thinned 36 acres — cutting and trimming trees and burning the piles — in the McCarthy University Subdivision Hazard Fuels Reduction project. It created a shaded fuel break: a strip of land treated to slow or stop a fire, between park land and private property, to protect homes, infrastructure and lives.

A monitoring plot before treatment. NPS.

Checking on it

Alaska regional fire ecologists designed a study to see whether the treatment met its goals, how potential fire behavior changed, and when it would need re-treating.

• 27 plots, first measured in early summer 2011, just before the cutting.
• Re-measured in 2012, 2016 and 2022, the third visit since treatment, by regional fire ecologists and Denali National Park fire effects monitors.
• In 2022 they added 3D terrestrial lidar scanning, a new technology that records the forest's structure in more detail.

The same plot one year after cutting. NPS.

And eleven years after cutting. NPS.

A decade on, the question is whether regrowth has undone the break — and when it will need work again. The project is funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Sources

Based on "Bipartisan Infrastructure Law-funded project protects lives and infrastructure in rural Alaskan community," National Park Service, Alaska Region fire management; a work of the United States government in the public domain.