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Trump administration officials and members of Congress walked along the burn scar from Utah’s devastating Cottonwood Fire last week and saw the damage from the rain and flood that followed.

If the forest had been thinned, with “a lot fewer trees per acre, and maybe even some controlled burns to take the underbrush out, there’s just not the fuel there when these fires start to make them catastrophic fires,” Rep. Bruce Westerman told FOX 13 News. The Arkansas Republican chairs the House Natural Resources Committee.

But these traditional fire prevention methods may no longer work, one researcher cautions, with a changing climate that makes hot, dry weather increasingly the norm.

“Weather and climate override the effects of fuels in determining what happens in forested landscapes,” said Dominik Kulakowski, a professor of geography at Clark University in Massachusetts whose research focuses on climate and mountain ecosystems.

“The implication of that,” he said, “is that we’re losing our ability to manage forest fires.”

Larissa Yocom, a professor of fire ecology at Utah State University, agrees that today’s extreme wildfires defy the usual approaches to prevention — but she doesn’t think they are the West’s “new normal — yet.”

Fires are changing

Climate change, which brings intense heat, longer droughts and dry atmospheric conditions, has been the primary driver of wildfire risk in the West for the last two decades, according to studies by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The severe snow drought that afflicted Utah over the winter is 14 times more likely in the Upper Colorado River Basin states compared to the start of the industrial period, when humans began releasing climate-altering pollutants into the atmosphere, research published this month found.

Forests in the West evolved in response to fire, and fire has long been part of their normal ecological function, Kulakowski said. But fires are now changing faster than the forests can adapt.

Fuels like dry shrubs and stressed trees are a secondary factor that contributes to wildfires, and they are what most forestry treatments have focused on — like cutting fire breaks, creating defensible spaces around homes, thinning forests and scheduling prescribed burns.

Yet hot, fast fires can jump interstate highways and blow past fire breaks hundreds of yards wide, Kulakowski said.

“We’ve seen examples that embers from these dangerous megafires can travel ... about a mile,” the professor said. “What we can do to protect ourselves is becoming increasingly difficult.”

The country’s most expensive, deadly and destructive fires in recent decades were extremely fast moving. Utah’s own Cottonwood Fire exploded by 20,000 acres overnight late last month as firefighters evacuated homes and struggled to keep the blaze contained.

As long as the trend of warmer and drier weather conditions continue, so will the megafires. And as extremely hot and large fires increase, the ability for forest to regenerate also decreases, Kulakowski said.

“The soil is being sterilized,” Kulakowski said. “There are fewer surviving trees.”

Fewer trees mean fewer seeds to help forests regrow. In some cases, the types of forests that do resprout may look different — aspens may dominate up where conifers once thrived, for example. But in parts of the West, Kulakowski said, it appears no forest vegetation is regrowing at all.

“In which case we’re talking about ecosystem collapse,” he said. “We’re talking about forests disappearing from parts of the landscape.”

Time for a new approach?

But fire experts in Utah say traditional fire treatment methods still work and should be deployed across forests.

“We have a lot of examples where managing fuel is still beneficial and makes a difference,” said Yocom, the USU fire ecology professor.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers in Western states, including Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah and Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colorado, have sponsored the “Fix Our Forests Act” after spending months negotiating the best ways to manage woodlands and prevent catastrophic wildfire.

The bill creates “fireshed management areas” — fire-prone lands that pose the biggest risk to communities — where federal agencies would streamline and speed up fuel treatments. It has yet to receive a full vote in the Senate.

Yocom acknowledged, however, that there is little resource and forestry managers could have done to prevent some of the large wildfires that have burned across Utah this season.

“In the most extreme conditions, those on-the-ground factors get overwhelmed,” she said. “But I don’t think that is our new normal — yet.”

In the aftermath of the Cottonwood Fire, Yocom found stands of aspen and young, green trees that didn’t burn, she said.

If forestry managers allowed fires to burn in shoulder seasons, during cooler weather and milder conditions, wildfire might be less intense and have different affects on forests, Yocom said.

“It’s not pre-ordained that we are stuck with this kind of fire,” Yocom said. “The only type of fire we’re ‘allowing’ to happen right now are the ones that are burning in the conditions where we literally can’t do anything about it.”

An ecosystem imbalance

The Trump administration issued a directive this year calling on federal agencies to aggressively suppress all fires — including the smaller, milder ones that forests evolved with and may keep them healthy.

“We have an imbalance within our natural environments because basically, almost every ecosystem within Utah has developed out of an adaptation of fire,” said Bradley Washa, a firefighter and professor of wildland resources for USU, “and we have removed that fire from those ecosystems.”

A warming climate is impacting Western forests, Washa said, but it’s difficult to pin any single fire event to climate change.

And through his work on the ground, he continues to see how small things — like removing a firewood pile or clearing overgrown brush — can make the difference between a home surviving a wildfire or burning to the ground.

Still, “some of our fuel treatments and defensible space concepts are designed for your average fire,” Washa acknowledged, “not these extreme events.”