When a wildfire starts in one of Alaska's national parks, the people responsible for the land — agency administrators (AAs) — need room to choose how to respond. The National Park Service widens that decision space in three ways:
- Management options chosen in advance;
- Less fuel near the things at risk — through fuels treatments, and by managing some wildfires for their benefits to the land;
- Close coordination between fire managers and AAs.
Four options, set before the fire
Every national park in Alaska has a fire management plan that assigns each area one of four management options — Critical, Full, Modified or Limited. Together they span every kind of first response, from suppression to periodic surveillance of fires left to spread naturally. Because the choice is made ahead of time, fire managers can quickly decide where to protect and where to send firefighters.
These options, along with past fuels projects, have let wildfires play their natural role, thinning burnable vegetation in places and giving AAs more room to act.
The 2019 Foraker Fire
In 2019, Denali's Foraker Fire burned nearly 50,000 acres in a Limited management area. There, the default first step is to assess threats to nearby values and carry out surveillance and site protection as needed.
- After talking with the AAs, the NPS and the Bureau of Land Management Alaska Fire Service managed the fire actively: watching it from the air and protecting structures with sprinkler systems.
- The same year, the NPS Western Area Fire Management staff had finished fuels reduction projects at 20 sites and burned 15 acres of debris piles across four units in Denali.
No structures were lost, and the fire largely did its natural ecological work.
The Foraker Fire in Denali National Park and Preserve, June 2024. NPS photo by Rusty Brand
More funding, more treated ground
Since 2022, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) has added $1,875,178 for fuels reduction, and more areas of Denali have been treated to lower the risk to valued resources when fire comes.
The 2024 Foraker Fire
In June 2024 another fire — also called the Foraker Fire — started in roughly the same area. This time AAs had an area with fuels already reduced by the 2019 work. The fire was again monitored closely, but no firefighting tactics were needed, and crews could go elsewhere.
That mattered: it was a busy fire year in other parts of Alaska and in the Lower 48, and the limited firefighting resources were in high demand.
Sources
Based on "Increasing decision space for Agency Administrators with fuels work," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
1
0
0
0
Comments
