MISSOULA, Montana : Scientists at a federal laboratory in Montana that has focused on fire for decades are increasingly concerned about wildfires that spread to population centers as Americans build communities ever closer to forests.
Mark Finney, senior scientist at the U.S. Forest Service’s Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory, noted a pattern in January fires in California – which killed dozens of people and destroyed thousands of homes – and recent fires elsewhere.
“They start in a nearby wildland vegetation, find fuel material where it ignites and spreads very rapidly and under very dry and windy conditions. It spreads quickly from a wildland situation into a more urban situation,” he said during a tour for Reuters of his lab in late January.
Finney and his team set fires in a controlled environment for study and modeling. What they learn from such experiments about, for example, how far and fast fires can move is shared across the country and the world to help wildland fire managers make decisions when responding to fires.
Finney’s was one of three labs founded in the years after a 1949 fire in a remote area of the Helena National Forest in Montana killed 13 firefighters. The goal was to better understand how fire behaves to avoid such tragedies. Over the decades, one of the other labs, in California, has shifted focus to soil research and other areas. The third, in Georgia, closed in 1989.
“This is really the last lab left devoted to studying wildland fire behavior,” Finney said. “It is kind of an irony that we rely more on fire science now than we ever had. We have bigger and bigger questions and more consequences to society, our ecosystems and our communities from fire, and yet we have less and less resources to devote to scientific study of the subject.”
Work at the lab also has helped researchers identify areas of extreme wildfire risk in California and elsewhere, information the U.S. Forest Service makes available to the public.
Communities in areas where wildfire risk is high can apply for funds to use to help brace for disaster under the federal Community Wildfire Defense Grant Program that was part of a $1 trillion, five-year bipartisan infrastructure law President Joe Biden signed in 2021.
“I think what’s important about those kind of programs is that, you know, some of the larger communities that maybe have the financial resources and the staffing to implement wildfire planning and mitigation work are getting that work done without that additional funding,” said Greg Dillon, who directs the Missoula lab’s Fire Modeling Institute.
“But it’s a lot of the rural communities where the wildfire risk is, is really high, but they just simply don’t have the local capacity and resources to get that mitigation work done,” Dillon added.
Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has halted federal funding for programs to reduce wildfire risk as part of broad cuts to government spending, according to organizations impacted by the moves.
The Forest Service said in a February 24 email to Reuters that the Community Wildfire Defense Grant Program’s funding has continued and the deadline for applying for the grants has been extended by two weeks until March 14.
The Forest Service added that a waiver removing a cost-sharing requirement that had been available to Native American, Alaska Native, Pacific Island and US Virgin Islands communities was limited in February to low-income communities.
The Forest Service did not directly respond to a question about whether any Missoula lab staff were among the thousands of federal government workers laid off as part of a Trump effort to reduce the size of the federal government.
It instead sent a statement from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, of which the Forest Service is an agency, saying that about 2,000 probationary employees from across the Forest Service had lost their jobs.
