4 governors from West team up on fire strategy

Governors from four Western states met Monday to talk about how to fight, prevent and recover from wildfires.

Over 2.4 million acres have been consumed by wildfires so far this year in Idaho, Utah and Nevada. The governors from those three states met in Boise with Wyoming Gov. David Freudenthal joining the conference via phone.

The governors now hope to have a memorandum of understanding drafted in the next two weeks toward working collectively on a problem they said keeps getting worse every year.

"That is totally unacceptable," Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. said. "We've got to do better."

Huntsman singled out one major source of wildfire fuel, known as cheatgrass, and the need to reduce its presence in Utah.

Leaders of the neighboring states want to pool resources for fighting wildfires and work together on how to rehabilitate burned areas. They talked about a demonstration project that will use a mix of seeds intended to yield flora that is less likely to become fuel for fires. The results of that project may set a precedent for the four states on how to replant some areas after a wildfire.

Some of the wildfires in the four-state region have burned through areas used by ranchers where livestock rely on the land for food.

"It's more than just burning grass out there — it's an economy at risk," Idaho Gov. Jim Gibbons said.

Huntsman and Gibbons said working as a team will send a message to Washington that help from federal agencies is "terribly important" to the group.

Other Western states have also had an active wildfire season, with the Associated Press reporting over the past few days evacuations in Southern California and a state of emergency declaration in Montana.

This year's wildfire season in Wyoming has been relatively calm, with two large wildfires burning as of Monday in Yellowstone National Park (2,800 acres) and the Bridger-Teton National Forest (1,452 acres), according to the Boise-based National Interagency Fire Center.

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E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com