Tom Boatner
Chief of Fire Operations for the Bureau of Land Management, Tom Boatner oversees the fires that rage throughout the American West. Over the last ten years he’s seen fire seasons that break records in size, intensity, and acres burned. He describes the reasons for this increase in fire activity, as well as what the BLM and other agencies are hoping to do to stop the flames.
On why the fires are so intense:
“We’ve seem some fairly dramatic changes in the last eight or ten years, and we generally think of three factors that are driving the change in wildfires, particularly in the American West. One is climate change. There is no doubt that we’re dealing with summers that are hotter and drier and longer than anything we’ve seen in our time here in the west. We’re dealing with the buildup of fuels on public lands in the west from a century of very successful fire suppression, and we’re dealing with millions and millions of homes built in these forested and wooded landscapes that want to burn. The convergence of those three factors has led to a huge increase in the size of the fires we’re seeing, the total acres burned, and the intensity of the fires we’re dealing with over the last eight or ten years.”
On the presence of homes and fighting fires:
“It’s changed the whole way we fight fire, because as soon as you start throwing in people’s homes, our tactics have to change to protect the homes... It’s made it more expensive because we have to bring in more resources and more expensive resources to try to protect people’s homes when they’re built in places and in ways that makes them incredibly difficult and sometimes dangerous to defend.”
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