Firefighting plan aims to protect Western habitat

BOISE – U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has released the initial plan for a new wildfire-fighting strategy to protect a wide swath of intermountain West sagebrush country that supports cattle ranching and is home to a struggling bird species.

The 27-page report released Tuesday calls for prioritizing and protecting areas most at risk by using veteran crews, rural fire departments and fire protection associations made up of ranchers who can respond quickly. The previous strategy didn’t call for specific efforts to protect the habitat.

The plan heading into the 2015 wildfire season also calls for accelerating efforts to restore burned rangelands by developing a strategy for storing and distributing locally adapted seeds to try to keep invasive species such as cheatgrass from returning.

“Cheatgrass and other invasive species have contributed to making rangeland fire one of the greatest threats to the Great Basin – not only to sagebrush habitat, but to wildlife, ranching and other economic activities that depend on a healthy landscape,” Jewell said in a statement. “As we head into the 2015 fire season, the actions recommended in this report will help ensure that our preparedness, response and recovery strategies better align with the threats facing the West.”

The Boise-based National Interagency Fire Center, which assigns resources throughout the nation during wildfire season, is already adopting new strategies. One of them is a plan to position fire crews in the Great Basin ahead of fire season.

“That’s the key thing that we will be doing differently,” said Randy Eardley, a fire center spokesman. Previously, he said, fire crews only responded – sometimes from great distances – once wildfires had started and spread. “If we have more crews available in the area, then yes, it could be very effective,” he said.

In the last decade, rangeland fires have been especially destructive in the Great Basin region of Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Oregon and California.

The plan requires making a priority the protection of sage-steppe ecosystems where sage grouse live.

The wide-ranging bird is under consideration for federal protections, and just the potential listing by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has already put on hold development of wind farms and oil and gas drilling plans in some areas. Experts say an endangered-species listing could damage Western states’ economies.

Besides sage grouse habitat, the gigantic wildfires have destroyed rangeland that ranchers rely on to graze cattle.

In a statement Tuesday, Idaho Gov. Butch Otter said that “many of the points echo the strategies that have been fundamental to my sage-grouse protection plan for some time now.”