Following a historically dismal winter snowpack, state wildfire officials warned neighboring states to secure their own firefighting equipment ahead of this summer's concurrent regional mega-fires.
BROOMFIELD, Colo.—Following a historically dismal winter snowpack, Colorado wildfire officials clarified Tuesday that the state’s interstate mutual aid agreements will be temporarily suspended in the likely event that the entire American Southwest catches fire at the exact same time this summer.
The announcement marks a logistical shift in the National Interagency Fire Center’s traditional resource-sharing model, which was originally drafted under the mid-century assumption that at least one state in the region would not be actively burning to the ground during peak fire season. With drought monitors showing severe tinderbox conditions extending from Colorado’s heavily forested ski corridors down to the Mexican border, state authorities confirmed they will simply need all of their own helicopters to manage their own historic mega-fires.
We remain deeply committed to our interstate partnerships, provided those partners only catch fire sequentially, preferably between November and February.
Under the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, Western states have historically loaned each other hotshot crews, air tankers, and incident management teams during localized crises. However, recent modeling aligned with the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report suggests the concept of a localized crisis is no longer applicable to the North American fire season. The United States Forest Service previously warned that resource-sharing becomes mathematically impossible when the donor state and the recipient state are both trapped beneath the same stationary atmospheric ridge.
Colorado officials noted they will still happily process mutual aid requests from neighboring states, though the requisite paperwork will likely be filed in an evacuated, smoke-filled regional office. The state plans to finalize its updated isolationist fire strategy by next quarter, shortly before the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration releases its routine summer forecast of unprecedented, multi-state heat domes.