The annual Great Basin Fire Prevention Workshop, May 11-13 in St. George, Utah, focused on wildland/urban interface fire programs with a theme of Fire in a Changing World. According to Neil Sampson, a Senior Fellow with American Forests, the fastest growth rates around cities just happen to be in the highest fire danger areas. Changes in ownership in interface areas also affect fire management. "The number of owners is increasing while the size of parcels is decreasing," he said. "Seventeen acres is too big to trim and too little to log. The key is developing partnerships with surrounding landowners."

Sampson says we need to change the old messages about wildfire -- We can prevent forest fires, Good forestry means suppressing all fires, Fires don�t happen here. He says the new message is that fire is a part of Western environments. "Fire behavior is the critical part. Management does not mean eliminating fire; it means changing fire behavior. Fuels affect fire behavior, and we can change fuels -- that�s the part we can do something about."

One key to pulling that off is public education, and Dean Burnham, AFMO on the Bridger-Teton National Forest, illustrated how effective it can be. "On the Bridger-Teton, we had a 2,000-plus-acre fire in 1986. We had another 2,000-plus-acre fire in 1988, and in 1989 we had one that went 9,000 acres. All three were started by fireworks. We got together with all the districts and looked at where people go. We identified the risk and value components -- hazards associated with topography and vegetation and humans and lightning, and values associated with scenic areas and threatened and endangered species. We looked at what we were losing for the dollars we spent, and we determined that people weren�t educated on fire problems. We worked on that, and we cut our human-caused fires by 50 percent."

Jim Soter, a county commissioner from Kamas, Utah, spent 30 years with the Forest Service. He said Summit County is the second-fastest-growing county in the nation. Covering about 1.25 million acres, nearly half of which is national forest land, the county will host the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. It includes a lot of one-way canyons, three school districts with different tax bases, and four fire districts -- a big challenge for coordinated fire management.

"This is difficult to do politically," said Soter. "But we need good land management plans that will withstand litigation. We�ve spent $3 million in the last few years in planning, and there�s been a lot of planning litigation. We have 10 or 12 suits against the county now, but we haven�t lost any yet. The key is to get people involved in the process."

Steven Mihelic, assistant chief in Carson City, Nevada, has 22 years in fire service and says public education is best targeted at groups. "We have to recognize that we will have wildland/urban interface fires, and that house fires can become multi-million-dollar forest fires. We�ve tried to get a message across to homeowners in our area: If you build it there, you�re going to have to help me protect it. We�ve given the publics our wildland/urban interface code in chunks, because they�re not ready for all of it. We�ve targeted groups including politicians, the builders� associations, real estate agents, the chambers and other community groups, and the insurance companies. What these groups need to understand is that it�s in their best interest to team up on this."

Marc Mullenix is wildland fire coordinator with Colorado�s Boulder Fire Department; he�s put in 18 years in fire -- in three countries -- and is on two national teams in the Rocky Mountain Region. In Boulder in 1994 they proposed a total ban on wood shake shingles -- and got away with it. There was no public opposition. Boulder has a serious interface set-up -- 50,000 acres of open parks around the city, 3 million visitors each year, and not-uncommon 100 mph winds.

"We deal with this double-edged sword," said Mullenix. "If a prescribed fire gets loose, we look like fools, but if we put it out, we look like heroes. In 1990 we had a chinook wind that took temperatures from 25 to 40 degrees -- we lost 10 homes in 20 minutes. After that we organized a wildfire mitigation group."

The conference, sponsored by the Great Basin Fire Prevention Committee and the Utah Fire Forum, attracted a couple hundred fire folks from several states and was a big success at exchanging information across state lines and among agencies.