Management
The Inyo National Forest contributes to increased awareness and understanding about wildfire risk among community leaders, service providers, homeowners, permittees, and Tribes who are invested in or adjacent to the Inyo National Forest. This includes an understanding about the need to adapt communities, properties, and structures to wildfire while also recognizing that wildland fire is a needed ecological process.
Before a wildfire
Where feasible and suitable, fire managers use grazing, mechanical treatment, prescribed fire, or wildfires managed to meet resource objectives to reduce vegetation buildup to lower the risk of unwanted wildfire.
Prior to and during the fire season, fire managers constantly assess conditions to meet goals within strategic fire management zones. Fire managers work with Tribes and adjacent landowners to identify resources of value and methods to reduce costs and increase effectiveness of restoring fire to the landscape.
Hazardous fuel reduction treatments are prioritized in areas that pose the greatest threat to communities and highly valued resources by reducing fuels along ridges, roads, or other natural or man-made features that can potentially be useful during prescribed fires and in managing wildfire.
Fire investigators assess human-caused fire starts and design prevention activities that reduce the likelihood of the most common human-caused ignition fire sources.
During a wildfire
Inyo National Forest wildland firefighters' top priority is protection of life. Then other resources at risk such as property and resources come second.
When determining the appropriate wildfire management strategy, firefighters use tools such as risk assessments, operating plans, and a Forest Service decision support system which evaluates key habitat areas for at-risk species ahead of fire season, as well as other natural and cultural resources.
Most of the time, wildfires are managed as full-suppression wildfires. Inyo National Forest works closely with their interagency cooperators to maximize resources for fire response during both initial attack and extended attack incidents.
Fire managers can also use naturally ignited wildland fires (such as lightning strikes) to meet multiple resource management objectives where and when conditions are present for the best fire effects on the landscape. These objectives include habitat restoration for wildlife and their ecosystems, and reducing hazardous fuels.
After a wildfire
After a wildfire is contained, work on the incident does not end for the forest, nor for the community that is affected.
During the later stages of containing a large wildfire, a Burned Area Emergency Response team (BAER) may be ordered to evaluate effects to resources at risk without the vegetation holding the soil and water that used to be there. This team works closely with several agency and local government officials on what risks there are, and what potential mitigations need to be put in place to reduce that risk.
In the years following a wildfire, there is potential for restoration, but this depends on where the fire happened and what resources were impacted.