1988 Fire Season, Yellowstone National Park
Starting in the 1970s, Yellowstone National Park experimented with a policy that allowed natural fires to burn within park boundaries. In 1988, a series of highly destructive wildfires put this policy to the test, leading to a comprehensive review of the National Park Service’s fire management procedures.
In 1972, the United States National Park Service (NPS) adopted Yellowstone National Park’s first fire management plan, which allowed natural fires to burn in designated parts of the park. In 1976, a revised plan expanded this controversial approach, called prescribed natural fire or the “let-burn” policy, to impact the entire park. Historically, fires played a key role in thinning forests and clearing dry, dead plants from the landscape, and species like lodgepole pine trees rely on extreme heat from fires to release their seeds and reproduce. In theory, prescribed natural burning maintained these conditions and controlled the damage fires caused. While smoke pollution from let-burn events caused controversy throughout the 1970s, they scorched only 34,175 of Yellowstone's 2,221,800 acres between 1977 and 1988. The Park Service extinguished any fires that threatened people, buildings, or roads.
In the summer of 1988, dry weather and high winds created dangerous conditions in Yellowstone. On June 14, 1988, lightning sparked the Storm Creek Fire just north of the park near Cooke City, Montana, and it gradually made its way into Yellowstone’s boundaries. Initially, NPS allowed about twenty lightning-caused fires, including Storm Creek, to burn in every corner of Yellowstone. Without rainfall to dampen their impact, wind spread the fires rapidly. By July 15, the Park Service suspended the let-burn policy and fought every fire that threatened the park.
The public idolized Yellowstone as the first national park and a crown jewel of the park system, so the 1988 fires rapidly generated a significant media presence in Yellowstone and caused public backlash. By August, the Cable News Network (CNN) and National Broadcasting Company (NBC) sent reporters to the park and presented daily fire updates. When the largest blaze in the park, the North Fork Fire, threatened the historic Old Faithful Inn on September 7, reporters and their viewers blamed NPS officials and the let-burn policy for allowing the fires to spread out of control. A week later, presidential candidate Michael Dukakis visited the park to generate publicity for his campaign, symbolizing the fires’ grip on national media.
When snow finally ended the fires in November, fifty-one total fires had burned 995,000 acres, damaging about forty-five percent of the park. They destroyed sixty-seven structures in total, including thirty-six privately owned homes, garages, and stores. The North Fork Fire alone scorched approximately 495,000 acres. After the fires, two review committees found that they represented a perfect storm of natural conditions that made them incredibly difficult to fight, but politicians and the media continued to place blame on NPS management strategies. On July 12, 1989, the Park Service began a systematic review of its fire management procedures. Its new policy, approved in 1991, set detailed limits on the prescription and containment of natural fires, rolling back much of the let-burn approach. Firefighters still use prescribed burns and let-burn management to maintain healthy forests in national parks today, sustaining the 1991 policy.Images
