Feds tout funding to fight fires at Mount Charleston, across West
A federal infrastructure bill passed last year will help address the “wildfire crisis” in the West, including at Mount Charleston, officials said Friday.
Speaking at press conference at the Spring Mountains Visitor Gateway, Homer Wilkes, undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources and environment, said wildfires are a “major” concern for the Biden administration.
“We want to actually suppress those wildfires, and you do that by reducing the ‘fuel’ that’s on the floor of the forest,” Wilkes said with a snow-covered Mountain Charleston in the background.
Wilkes did not specify how much money Nevada will receive through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law but said it would be “seven figures.”
Wilkes told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that funding go toward increasing the pay of firefighters and creating fire breaks, which are sections of land spacious enough to slow a fire down.
According to the National Interagency Fire Center, 87 percent of wildfires are caused by humans. In 2020, there were 58,950 wildfires that burned a total of more than 10 million acres. Suppressing those blazes cost the U.S. Forest Service and Department of the Interior more than $2.2 billion combined, according to the fire center.
Mary Farnsworth, regional forester for the Forest Service’s Intermountain Region, said there are three factors that affect the behavior of wildfires: weather, typography and the amount of “fuel” on the ground.
Farnsworth focuses on the fuel, which is dried vegetation such as leaves, shrubs and loose pines on the ground that act like fuel to a fire. Funding from the bill will go toward cleaning up the fuel on the ground.
Farnsworth said what she learned most from the Caldor Fire near Lake Tahoe last year was how embers can travel roughly a quarter-mile and push a fire over several acres if they land on dry vegetation.
She said the West is in a severe drought and that dwindling snow levels and water runoff allow the vegetation to dry out much quicker, creating more fuel and lengthening the fire season.
Contact Jimmy Romo at jromo@reviewjournal.com. Follow @jimi_writes on Twitter.
