DENVER — The federal suspension of prescribed burns pending a review of how recent fires lit during extreme drought escaped boundaries is reverberating in the West — and complicating Colorado efforts to revive ailing forests and reduce the severity of wildfires.
Foresters for years have favored more, not less, deliberate controlled burning as the most affordable and ecologically sound way to boost forest and grassland resilience. The 90-day pause that U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore has declared — responding to recent mishaps where prescribed fires blew out of control — will delay projects to reduce risk across 14,000 acres in Colorado and 18,500 acres in the Rocky Mountain region, according to federal data obtained by the Denver Post. Among those projects may be the planned burns to protect threatened water supplies for Colorado Springs and Aurora.
The federal halt also is raising concerns at a deeper level that climate warming and extreme aridity increasingly may jeopardize the use of prescribed fire due to safety concerns.
