To form the association, the parties signed agreements to work together, and the ranchers received more than 40 hours of wildfire training. “We’re extremely excited about it,” he says. Glazier sees a clear need for the Mountain Home Rangeland Fire Protection Association, and perhaps others in southern Idaho. “It was a safety liability issue for the government.” “What came out of that was ranchers weren’t allowed to come on a fire,” Acarregui said. The BLM’s policy that prohibited ranchers and other private citizens from working on wildfires resulted from a lawsuit filed against the BLM in the aftermath of the Initial Point range fire near Kuna in 1995, a fire that killed two Kuna firefighters. And it was a very unsafe way to suppress a fire.” “The feds were doing their own thing, and the ranchers were doing their own thing, which raises a lot of safety concerns. “In the late 80s, ranchers would come to fires and do some suppression work, but they were kind of operating as a stand-alone entity,” says Steve Acarregui, fire operations manager for the BLM Boise District. “Because of that, it’s proactive for us to put something together that addresses the issue of first response.”īLM officials admit that the federal policy regarding whether ranchers could help fighting range fires has been inconsistent. “In the United States, the most fires are right here, they burn the most ground,” Wootan says. It’s also due to the large amount of highly flammable cheatgrass growing in the area. The fire frequency is related to people throwing cigarettes out the window of vehicles on Interstate 84, flaming bits of rubber from flat tires, careless target-shooting practices, and more. A national wildfire frequency map shows that the Southwest Idaho region burns more often than any other place in the nation. In fact, the rangelands near Mountain Home have been getting burned repeatedly almost every year. Some of the tactics that the BLM was using weren’t getting to the issue of stopping the fires at a short duration.” “It’s important to us to protect the resource the best we could. “We do make a living off this land,” says Charlie Lyons, Mountain Home rancher. Ranchers felt the BLM policy was unacceptable. When the BLM fire crew showed up, Wootan said, the ranchers “were asked to leave, they did, and that fire that was potentially a 5-15 acre fire grew to a 40,000-acre fire.” “Two ranchers had it controlled and shut down until the BLM could get there. “We had a fire, a lightning strike that started some ground on fire over by the Blair Trail Reservoir,” said Wes Wootan, a Glenns Ferry farmer and Elmore County commissioner. The Rural Fire Protection Association was formed in hopes of halting the cycle. Rangelands around Mountain Home in the Snake River Plain have burned repeatedly over the last three decades.
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