More prescribed fires could be happening in Mendocino National Forest soon

MENDOCINO Co., 11/10/21 — Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an agreement with the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) to conduct prescribed burns on a million acres of the state’s land every year. That would be 500,000 acres apiece for the state and federal agency. So far, neither the state nor the Forest Service are having an easy time meeting that goal, but things look like they’re moving in a more positive direction for the latter in at least one forest.

Last month, the U.S. Forest Service released a draft environmental assessment on its strategy for conducting prescribed fires across various landscapes, excluding designated wilderness areas, on 688,700 acres of the Mendocino National Forest. “We will have different goals depending on where we’re implementing it in the forest,” Angela Chongpinitchai, the forest’s fire planner and fuels specialist who wrote the assessment, said in a September interview. “And so it could be from something like cleaning up the fuels that are left from these catastrophic wildfires or it could be going in for the first time and introducing fire to a green area that has not had fire, but needs fire.”