6.2.1 Case Study #1: 1988 Yellowstone Fire Complex

“Human activities altered the pattern and extent of the fires of 1988”. Agee, 2000.

The wildfire equivalent of the Mount St. Helens eruption of eight years earlier [128], the Yellowstone National Park [YNP] 1988 fires were broadcast locally, nationally, and globally, the over-arching message thereof that, an ecological catastrophe, the fires required fighting, and at all resource costs. However, as discussed earlier, though fire suppression during the late 19th and early to mid 20th century had increased the overall fuel-load within the fire complex, the event was, nonetheless, within the historical [<1890s] intensity and severity range of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s fire regimes.

While a wildland, as one of the foremost sites of geothermal research worldwide, a major international tourism and leisure destination, and place of outstanding natural beauty, from its inauguration as a national park onwards, YNP has become populated by an array of buildings and infrastructure that serve its scientific, education, commercial, and wider interests. Spread throughout the park, its structures fall under the intermix classification, which even accounting for defensible space, renders them at high risk due to the behaviours of the park’s mixed to high severity fire regimes. Beyond the park’s extensive boundary reside several wildland urban interface communities of varying scales. Thus, when, in late June 1988 it became evident that fires of historic proportions may be about to unfold the emphasis was not merely on protecting the buildings within the park, but beyond.

Within the park, largely wooden structures, many several decades old, rendered their materiality aligned to that of the forests about them. Therein, fuel supplies aside, the threat was not ecological, and arguably, in the greater economic scheme of things, not financial, given that, compared to the fires that have since unfolded elsewhere, the property values were incremental. However, the cultural and emotional value of the buildings was great, and not least to the people that lived and worked in the park. Reading accounts of the collective effort that was made to protect the buildings [Henry, 2015] [Figs. 64 and 65], it is much evident that, regardless of the scale of the event, local knowledge of the park’s fire regimes, topography, and other landscape features, together with immense courage and commitment, reduced the structures lost to a mere sixty-seven: a feat made even more extraordinary for the fact that not merely did 793,000> acres burn in toto, but not one, but several fires were burning from the start to the finish of the firestorm.

Politically, the event is dichotomous, in that while the park’s rangers, firefighters, and residents largely recognised the role of fire in the GYE, as, given their initial rhetoric, did President Reagan’s office, misleading media coverage fuelled arguments, policy and otherwise, as to how the fires ought to be handled (Ibid). But, regardless thereof, the some 25,000 persons that were mobilised regionally and nationally, including land, sea, and air troops, succeeded in protecting the lives of all within the YNP boundary. Both within and beyond the park, fire crews and supporting personnel prevented against the fires spreading to several neighbouring WUI communities including Cooke City and Silver Gate, Montana, and largely prevented against their spread in two further communities, Sunlight Basin and Crandall Creek.

However, as both the atmospheric and political climate shift, and as building in areas adjacent to the YNP increase, the need to review policy, related building codes, and that which is built therefrom, as extends not merely to the construction, but to mining, and other resource extraction activities, remains great. If there’s a take-away from the YNP 1988 fires it’s that, though instances there are when too many are the cooks in the strategy kitchen, co-existing with fire complexes is not one: protecting lives during events of their complexity and scale requires deep and diverse expertise, skills, and knowledge, both within and beyond the scientific community, and not least when, as earlier, some researchers estimate that by 2100, annual burned area in the region in which YNP is located, could increase by 600>%.