Some blame BLM policies for huge blaze

By BOBBY MAGILL The Daily Sentinel

Friday, July 13, 2007

RICHFIELD, Utah — The spread of the Milford Flat Fire across a wide swath of central Utah desert is sparking concern among some Utah lawmakers that the Bureau of Land Management hasn’t managed the cheatgrass and pinyon-covered rangeland within the burn area well enough to prevent wildfires.

The Milford Flat Fire, ignited July 6 by lightning, is Utah’s largest-ever wildfire, incinerating more than 363,000 acres of rangeland upon which many area ranchers depended for their livelihoods.

Incident Cmdr. Rowdy Muir said Thursday afternoon the fire is 65 percent contained following a day of light winds and successful firefighting efforts.

Utah Cattlemen’s Association President Jim Ekker said the fire devastated ranchers already financially stressed because cattle feed is scarce and expensive.

But Utah state Sen. Dennis Stowell, R-Parowan, said despite drought conditions, ranchers may have been dealt an unnecessary blow.

“I just feel like (we have) failed environmental policy in the whole country,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of fuel build-up, a lot of pinyon-juniper. We’re not managing the land enough.”

Stowell, who toured the burn area Wednesday, criticized the BLM for not allowing enough cattle to graze rangeland in the region and permitting pinyon-juniper forests killed by bark beetles to remain standing.

As a testament to the fire resistance of intensely managed land, some of the rangeland in the Milford Flat Fire’s path that was pastured didn’t burn, Stowell said.

“Years ago, we didn’t have a lot of forest fires or range fires because we had proper grazing,” Millard County Commissioner John C. Cooper said.

Now, he said, the BLM is often too eager to limit grazing, especially during a drought.

“The abundance of fuel has become crazy,” he said. “When we have these fires, it’s replaced by cheatgrass. We need to reseed this burned area.”

Reseeded, that is, with native grasses, he said, to prevent another “disaster” on par with Milford Flat from happening again.

The BLM has become better at managing its land and working with grazing permittees, BLM Fillmore Field Manager Sherry Hirst said.

The rangeland fires of 1996 burned about as much land in the area as the Milford Flat Fire has, but it was in multiple blazes spread throughout the Fillmore BLM office’s jurisdiction, she said. All of those areas were reseeded for grazing, she said, but many of them burned again.

The Milford Flat burn area needs to be reseeded with fire-resistant perennial grasses that will return after an area has burned, Utah State Grazing Program Director Bill Hopkin said.

He called the spread of fire- fueling cheatgrass throughout the West “frightening.”

When the BLM tried experimenting with various mixes of perennial plants, however, they all went up in flames in previous wildfires, Hirst said.

Nonetheless, the only way to beat wildfires, she said, is to establish some type of vegetation — not necessarily native species — other than cheatgrass.

The BLM, Hirst said, plans to work with various state and federal agencies to do just that. But once those grass seeds have been spread across the burn area, it could take more than three years to appear, she said.

“We are going to have to ask for a lot of patience and time for this vast amount of damaged land to be healed,” she said. “This isn’t a quick fix.”

Meanwhile, she said, the BLM will do what it can to work with ranchers and local communities to recover from Milford Flat.

Bobby Magill can be reached via e-mail at bmagill@gjds.com.