Wildfire suppression in Idaho is an exercise in cooperation between a myriad of agencies. The Idaho Department of Lands (“IDL”) works alongside two timber protection associations, dozens of volunteer rural fire protection associations, and the federal fire management agencies of the U.S. Forest Service (“USFS”) and U.S. Wildland Fire Services (“USWFS”) through complex cooperative agreements and cost-share arrangements.

But before we can examine Idaho’s wildfire suppression policy, we have to step back to the Western Expansion and the birth of our national forests. During this time, our nation was struggling to reconcile its skyrocketing timber needs with the decimated eastern forests caused by unchecked demand.

The Birth of the National Forests

The early origins of our nation’s fire suppression policy actually began in Idaho at the insistence of the timber industry. Before statehood, the U.S. Government sent surveyors across the frontier to map the territories and inventory the rich natural resources for the eventual westward expansion. Survey reports noted that North Idaho was found to hold the “most valuable body of timber in the interior of the Continent.”[1]

As the westward expansion gained momentum under the Homestead Act of 1862[2], many feared that the rich western timberlands would quickly be decimated by speculators.[3] By 1865, railroads were using an estimated 6.5 million cords of wood, hundreds of millions of board-feet of construction lumber, and millions hemlock, chestnut, and oak trees annually.[4] Lumber companies helped themselves to the public forests in the Midwest. In Michigan, after cutting more than 160 billion board feet of lumber from 1847 to 1897, only 6 billion board feet remained.[5] 

Industrial heads and citizens began calling on the government to prevent a deforestation similar to the eastern timberlands, which had disappeared for the sake of settlement, goods, steamboats, and railroads. As the West was slowly claimed piece by piece, the nation’s mindset about public lands began to shift from disposal toward retention.

The Forest Reserve Act of 1891

On March 3, 1891, a one-sentence rider attached to a homesteading bill authorized the president to “[s]et apart and reserve . . . public land bearing forests . . . whether of commercial value or not, as public reservations . . . .”[6] This small but mighty amendment authorized the president to establish forest reserves by withdrawing timberland from sale and homesteading. Gifford Pinchot called it “the most important legislation in the history of Forestry in America.”

President Benjamin Harrison was the first to test the new law by creating the Yellowstone Park Timberland Reserve.[7]  By the end of his term in 1893, Harrison had created fifteen additional forest reserves, encompassing 13 million acres of timber.

The early forest reserves were extremely controversial and very unpopular among industry and speculators who wanted to acquire the West’s valuable timber resources for themselves. They believed the nation’s rich resources should be controlled by private industry instead of the government.

In 1896, President Grover Cleveland formed the National Forest Commission, whose members included John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, to identify new potential timber stands for reservation.[8] The Commission visited the reserves created by Harrison, as well as other forests in the Pacific Northwest, ultimately recommending several new forest withdrawals.

Anticipating certain backlash, Cleveland refrained from acting until ten days before he left office. On February 22, 1897—George Washington’s birthday—Cleveland withdrew over 21 million acres, creating thirteen new forest reserves, which in Idaho included the Priest River and the Bitterroot reserves.[9] Cleveland’s other reserves included the Black Hills, Big Horn, Teton, Flathead, Lewis and Clark, Washington, Olympic, Mount Rainier, and the Stanislaus. Congress tried to invalidate Cleveland’s withdrawals by passing an amendment to an appropriations bill, forcing him to choose between axing the forest reserves or creating a government shutdown. Cleveland chose the latter and vetoed the bill on his last day in office.

The Organic Act of 1897

As expected, Cleveland’s reserves caused a political firestorm, with conservationists applauding the reservations and the timber and mining industries deeply opposed. The withdrawals were suspended for nine months while the legality of the Forest Reserve Act was hotly debated.[10] At the center of the storm was the Act’s apparent lack of any clear management policy or direction as to who would assume responsibility for managing the reserves and protect them from fire and pillage. In short, the debate ran, if the federal government was going to withdraw lands from the public domain, Congress should direct how those lands would be administered.

This uproar led to creation of the Organic Administration Act of 1897, stating as its purpose “to improve and protect the forest within the reservation . . . and to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States.”[11]

The Organic Act affirmed Harrison and Cleveland’s reservations. It also defined allowable purposes for future reservations and provided a charter for forest management.[12] It placed the U.S. Geological Survey in charge of mapping, and the General Land Office in charge of administration of the reserves.[13] In 1905, the Forest Transfer Act transferred 85 million acres of forest land to the Department of Agriculture, eventually leading to the creation of the USFS.[14]

From 1901 to 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt added 148 million acres of forest reserves, ensuring they were no longer open to settlement. In 1907, Roosevelt reorganized the forest reserves and officially rebranded them as national forests.[15] This created thirty-nine national forests, including (among others) the Boise, Payette, Salmon, Challis, Clearwater, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Kaniksu, and Pend Oreille National Forests.

Early Idaho Forestry Statutes – the Fallon Fire Law of 1907

The new national forests spurred organized efforts to control reoccurring forest fires, which largely fell to the newly created USFS. Individual states followed suit by enacting their own fire suppression laws, largely mirroring those of the nation. Before  statehood, fire burned freely in the endless timber stands in northern and central Idaho. After statehood, as the population exploded and the economy expanded, sawmill owners and loggers turned to the Legislature to provide fire protection for the timber on which their livelihoods depended.

The Idaho Legislature responded to the timber industry’s concerns by enacting the Fallon Fire Law of 1907—the first iteration of the Idaho Forestry Act.[16] This early law mandated that open fires in the forest be controlled, and criminalized the failure to use spark arrestors and unextinguished campfires.[17] It also prohibited anyone from carrying a torch, firebrand, or exposed light in or near forest land.[18] It required the railroads to provide fifty feet of clearance on each side of the tracks and prohibited leaving live coals or ashes in the immediate vicinity of forest land.[19] The State Land Commissioner was charged with enforcement, having full power to “arrest violators and deliver them to the nearest magistrate to be dealt with according to law.”[20] The Fallon Fire Law also created the “closed burn” season from May to October each year, which is still in place today.[21]

The Big Burn of 1910

In 1910, conditions across the West were unseasonably dry, creating a tinderbox. Several fires ignited in Idaho and Montana, caused by both lightning and humans. When the winds began blowing over the Palouse in August, the gusts, combined with low humidity and high fuel loads, caused the fires to merge, creating one of the largest wildfire disasters in history. Over 3 million acres containing 8 billion board feet of timber burned and 85 people tragically lost their lives in the firestorm that eventually became known as the “Big Burn.” The town of Wallace and several others were reduced to rubble and ashes. This tragedy, as they often do, shaped the fire policy of the USFS for decades. It also strongly influenced public perception of the government’s role in fire suppression, as well as the role of fire within the landscape. Fire was now perceived as the enemy.

In the aftermath of the Big Burn, Congress enacted one of the most transformative conservation laws to combat fire and protect the forests. The Weeks Act established 52 new national forests consisting of over 19 million acres.[22] More importantly, it provided the framework for federal and state cooperative agreements to fight wildfire.[23] This framework is still used as guidance today to draft cooperative agreements, combat climate change, protect endangered species, and manage urban forests. The Clarke-McNary Act of 1924 expanded this cooperation to include private forest landowners and allowed the USFS to create its own fire management policy.[24]

The Idaho Forestry Act of 1925

In 1925, the Idaho Legislature strengthened its existing fire laws to facilitate cooperation between agencies and private landowners in lockstep with the Clarke-McNary Act.[25] Because federal, state, and private ownership of forest lands is often adjacent and intermingled, it was becoming apparent that if one forest landowner neglected his timber and let it fall unmaintained, it created real risks to adjacent timber stands that were well-maintained and more able to withstand fire. For the first time, Idaho held private forest landowners responsible for providing “adequate and efficient fire protection that met the approval of the State Forester.”[26]

If the landowner failed to provide protection, the State Forester was authorized to provide it for them and bill the landowner for the actual costs of protection, including suppression.[27] It also created Idaho’s fire preparedness fund, assessing private forest landowners based on acreage.[28]

Landowners immediately challenged the assessments as “unreasonable, arbitrary, tyrannical, unconstitutional, and void.”[29]  In 1928, the Idaho Supreme Court upheld the Forestry Act as “a reasonable and proper police regulation designed to protect the forests of the state from destruction by fire.”[30]

The Birth of Fire Propaganda and Smokey Bear

The 1920s saw the creation of fire propaganda used to spread the word that wildfire was public enemy number one. However, fire prevention icon Smokey Bear did not emerge until 1944, during World War II in response to national paranoia about enemy-initiated wildfires. Early posters featuring Smokey warned the public that forest fires aided the enemy. In 1952, Congress established controls governing the use of Smokey under federal law known as the Smokey Bear Act.[31]

Smokey’s message evolved over the decades from wartime propaganda to encouraging everyone to prevent forest fires under the policy of full suppression and personal responsibility.

The Smokey Bear campaign was successful—some say a little too successful. When the fire prevention campaigns started in the 1920s, wildfire burned an estimated 30 million acres annually. By 1988, that number fell to around 7.4 million acres.

For decades, the campaigns fostered the idea that all wildfire was bad and preventable. In addition, the USFS had been steadily decreasing forest management by way of timber harvests beginning in the 1970s through the National Forest Management Act of 1976[32] and in the 1990s with the 1993 Northwest Forest Plan, both of which dramatically reduced logging in national forests. But in the late 1990s, new science began to emerge, asserting that wildfire can be a natural and restorative part of the ecosystem, clearing out decades of built-up fuels. Forest Service researchers boldly warned that the long-standing policy of aggressive wildfire suppression had contributed to a decline in forest health, a dangerous increase in fuel loads, and wildfires that were more difficult and expensive to control.[33]

Modern Wildfire Response in Idaho

Modern wildfire response is a highly complex exercise in cooperation between state, federal, municipal, and rural fire protection agencies. In the most basic sense, the USFS and USFWS are primarily responsible for fire protection within the national forests and on federal rangeland managed by the BLM. IDL is responsible for protection on all state and privately-owned forest lands. Cities and towns are protected by their own municipal fire departments. Finally, volunteer RFPAs patrol the most rural parts of the state, providing initial attack for structure and property protection within their capabilities.

Ownership of land in Idaho, however, is not so simple, resembling a checkerboard, with federal, state, tribal, and private ownership intermingled across the state. For this reason, staffing and equipping each agency to respond to wildfire based on land ownership is physically and fiscally impossible. Instead, when a wildfire is discovered, resources are assigned on a “closest forces” concept, meaning the closest resource responds, regardless of which agency is responsible for the fire or which agency employs the resource. Costs are sorted out later through cooperative agreements that include cost share provisions. In every instance, the agency receiving the help from the other agencies pays the costs.

Federal vs. State Suppression Policy

Regardless of who owns the land where the fire starts, all forest lands are impacted if the fire spreads beyond the boundary. The decision to crush a fire or let it burn is determined by the agency responsible for managing the fire. Federal agencies manage wildfire according to federal policy, which considers managing wildfire for different reasons or multiple objectives. The fire manager chooses tactics based on an evaluation of risks to firefighter and public safety, resource objectives, burning conditions, values at risk, and cost.

In doing so, it allows federal fire managers to let fire play its natural disturbance role in the landscape when they deem it appropriate. This “let it burn” policy may be employed in areas where traditional land management tools like logging or grazing are not utilized. Structure protection is generally not prioritized.

Conversely, state policy focuses on aggressive initial attack with a full-suppression strategy to keep fires below ten acres or less. IDL does not use wildfire to manage land, instead using timber management and controlled use of fire to protect forest health and decrease hazardous fuel loads. Idaho law declares uncontrolled wildfires to be public nuisances because of the threat they pose to life and property.[34] The Director of IDL and any fire warden are authorized to take action to summarily abate the “wildfire nuisance,” including the power to “commandeer tools, supplies, and equipment” and to employ or “compel assistance of able-bodied persons” without liability for trespass.[35]

While all fire managers have flexibility based on fire conditions, Idaho’s policy is to extinguish the fire at the minimum size allowed by firefighter safety and the resources available.

The Problem with the WUI

Regardless of state and federal wildland firefighting philosophy differences, there is a divide in unimproved forest suppression strategy and structure protection within the Wildland Urban Interface (“WUI”). The WUI is the area where structures and human development intermingle with wildland vegetation. In Idaho, about 42% of houses are located in the WUI.[36]

Suppressing wildfire in the WUI is costly, which creates an important focus among agencies when negotiating cooperative agreements. In a 2014 federal audit of California wildfire cost-share agreements, it was reported that wildfire suppression with structure protection in the WUI costs 28 times more per acre ($1,695/acre) compared to suppression on rangeland ($61/acre), and double that of fighting fire in timber ($779/acre).[37]

In a 2003 federal budget, it was reported that in some areas of WUI in the West, “the government pays more in suppressing fires than the fair market value of the structures threatened by those fires. It would literally be cheaper to let them burn and pay 100 percent of the rebuilding cost.”[38] As more first, second, and third homes are built in the WUI, wildfire suppression becomes more expensive each year, given the enormous costs to battle fire in forested areas peppered with houses.

This graph represents IDL’s fire suppression cost obligation through 2025, adjusted for inflation. The red line is the actual cost to Idaho for each season and does not include fires that originated on federal jurisdictions or federal suppression costs. As depicted, the costs are extremely variable.

Fire suppression cost peaked sharply in 2015 and 2021 due to low snowpack and severe drought. The 2015 fires required the use of twenty-seven incident management teams, more than double the amount of teams ever used in a single year. Over 75 homes and 220 other structures burned in 2015—the most ever recorded on IDL protected land. The dotted blue line represents a trend line over 20 years and suggests hotter and longer fire seasons. The orange line shows the average total over the past 10 years.

The table below shows the total obligation for fire suppression each year and the average cost of each fire started within IDL’s jurisdiction. Annual totals regularly fluctuate as it can take years to determine the actual numbers when multiple agencies and cost-sharing reimbursements based on prior agreements are involved.

The cost to suppress a wildfire is influenced by the amount and type of resources assigned to each fire. High intensity fires may burn for weeks and require hundreds of firefighters, heavy equipment, and expensive aircraft. Small fires that are detected early may be easily managed by a couple of personnel with shovels. Conversely, a high-intensity ten-acre fire crowning in heavy timber may require far more resources than a several hundred-acre fire burning in light fuels.

How do we pay for Suppression in Idaho?

Idaho pays for wildfire suppression through a combination of sources: forest protection assessments collected from private forest landowners; general fund allocations; federal cost share reimbursements; deficiency warrants; and criminal and civil actions against parties responsible for human-caused fires.

Forest protection assessments are collected through county property tax billings and deposited into an account dedicated to supporting preparedness, which puts firefighters and equipment in place before the fire season begins.[39]

General fund allocations are more nebulous because wildfires cannot be accurately budgeted or pre-appropriated—it is impossible to predict the number of ignitions from unattended campfires, exploding targets, fireworks, bird vs. powerlines, or lightning strikes each year. Regardless, the Legislature allocates tax dollars to pre-fund suppression accounts annually. When personnel and equipment are dispatched to a fire, payment for those resources is made from the suppression fund.[40]

If Idaho exhausts the pre-funded suppression balance during a relatively bad fire year, IDL is authorized to continue the important business of wildland firefighting through the use of deficiency warrants, which is similar to an emergency line of credit. This authority allows IDL to spend money to suppress wildfires without prior legislative appropriation. When the Legislature convenes in January, it reviews the suppression bills incurred during the previous fire season and appropriates funds to resolve the negative balance.

Finally, IDL actively seeks reimbursement for actual suppression costs from parties responsible for human-caused fires through restitution orders obtained through criminal cases and civil actions. Complaints are brought by the State against responsible parties seeking recovery for economic damages, which are limited to reasonable economic costs for controlling or extinguishing the fire. Suppression cost recovery actions have been successfully brought under claims of public nuisance, negligence, res ipsa loquitur, trespass, and violations of Idaho Code § 38-107, which was added to the Forestry Act in 1972.

Conclusion

Idaho’s wildfire laws have been shaped by the realities of the time, from the timber reservations in the late 1800s to adapting interagency cooperative frameworks for suppression after the Big Burn. Today’s realities include longer fire seasons, skyrocketing costs, and expanding development in the WUI, all of which present a new era of challenges. As suppression demands increase, the law in Idaho will continue to play a critical role in shaping the policies, agreements, and liability frameworks that determine how we respond to wildfire. Fire policy, like wildfire itself, is dynamic and will continue to evolve with the landscape.

About IDL

The Idaho Department of Lands manages over 2.5 million acres of state endowment land to generate revenue for the public schools and other endowments through grazing, mining, and other commercial leases. As trustees of endowment land, IDL is constitutionally mandated to maximize long term financial returns to the beneficiaries, mostly public schools. In addition, IDL is tasked with regulatory oversight of Idaho’s mining, forestry, natural gas, and logging industries. IDL also regulates permitting encroachments on Idaho’s navigable lakes and rivers to protect the public’s use of the waters. IDL is responsible for wildfire suppression on about 9.6 million acres of state owned and privately owned forest land.