A key part of the Forest Service’s approach to wildfire is on trial again after last week’s arrest of an agency employee overseeing a prescribed fire in the Malheur National Forest that escaped onto a private ranch in Oregon.
Forest policy groups, former Forest Service officials and others close to the management of national forests say they worry that a seemingly local incident — a sheriff in a rural county arresting a Forest Service employee for alleged reckless burning — will turn into a national backlash against the use of fire to manage forests that normally burn from time to time.
In a worst-case scenario, they said, the arrest in Grant County, Ore., population 7,272, could lead to similar incidents in other places where federal burn bosses — the people in charge of prescribed burns — follow an agency-approved fire plan but the flames escape boundaries due to changing weather conditions.
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