September has arrived, and Liz Davy’s firefighting work is ramping up.
The retired Ashton-Island Park District Ranger isn’t lacing up her boots and donning a yellow Nomex shirt. She’s booking dates for the Greater Yellowstone Fire Action Network to reach people who recently endured a wildfire, or may soon face one, and explore lessons learned. In some ways, that’s more complicated than planning a prescribed burn in July.
“We’re lessening the effects of fire on people’s values — their homes, their property, their campgrounds,” Davy told Mountain Journal. “That’s different than fire prevention. It’s taking actions that reduce or minimize the effects of smoke and fire on things people value.”
The Labor Day weekend has a fraught history in wildfire awareness. In 2020, Oregon incurred its worst wildfire disaster in state history over the holiday weekend. A wind event with hurricane force drove 16 fires across 919,000 acres, destroying more than 4,000 homes and killing 11 people. In Montana, the infamous 1988 Canyon Creek fire started in early summer as a one-tree smoldering lightning strike. It was allowed to burn as a prescribed fire deep in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, with a prediction it might scorch between 600 and 30,000 acres. Then a freak jet stream shift the first week of September triggered a 240,600-acre run that stopped at the edge of Augusta. On September 6, 107 firefighters had to deploy personal shelters when their safety zone was burned over. There were no fatalities or serious injuries.
Each of those incidents added to the legacy of experience and understanding about wildland fire. But that doesn’t mean people take the lessons to heart. 1988 was also the year nearly half of Yellowstone National Park burned. Davy said it often rocks her that she’s now talking to audiences of people who weren’t born when fires lit up America’s first national park.
“We used to think Yellowstone was destroyed, and we’ll never have the national park again,” Davy said. Today, the park appears undamaged and its fire lessons have lost their urgency.
Explaining the shifting nature of fire science isn’t getting any easier. Take this year’s national fire statistics: By September 2 this year, almost 47,000 fires had been reported across the country. Last year saw a total of 24,909. But 2025’s incidents affected 4.1 million acres, compared to 2024’s 6.5 million. Which was the worse year?
Confoundingly, a new study from the University of California-Irvine reports that while the global acreage burned each year has dropped by more than a quarter since 2002, the number of people put at risk in those fires has jumped by 40 percent.
Davy and her colleagues use those details to reinforce bigger messages. At the core, her pitch is that wildfire is a real part of the landscape, not an abstract gambling risk to be ignored. And that’s often a pitch that rarely works in a conference hall workshop.
“It’s one person at a time, one acre at a time, one neighborhood at a time,” said Davy, who spent 40 years as a silviculturist and forest ecologist in the U.S. Forest Service. “Sometimes there are very small measures of success.”
In 2014, Davy started coaching neighbors at the Stone Gate community in Island Park on how to make their homes more defensible. Since then, she calculates that about three-quarters of the properties have done some kind of mitigation; removing nearby fuels or hardening their houses to withstand ember storms.
“We’ve found if people feel more prepared, they’re far more accepting of fire as something that belongs out there.”
Liz davy, Project Coordinator, Greater Yellowstone Fire Action Network
The Greater Yellowstone Fire Action Network launched three years ago to expand that campaign across fire-prone parts of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. It teams with any receptive local organization, from volunteer fire chiefs and town mayors to civic groups like Moms Clean Air Force. Funding comes from the Forest Service and the Nature Conservancy.
“A lot of this is hard to explain,” Davy said. “People smell smoke and they automatically ask ‘Why don’t you just put it out?’ We know from research that doesn’t work. People get really nervous around prescribed fire, or fires ignited for restoration purposes. They want to know ‘Will it get away? How will it affect me?’ We’ve found if people feel more prepared, they’re far more accepting of fire as something that belongs out there.”
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People react to wildfires differently than other natural disasters, according Niko Efstathiou, a fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in Oxford, Great Britain. In his analysis of wildland fire around the globe, Efstathiou identified four factors that separate them from hurricanes, earthquakes and similar catastrophes.
The first is that wildfires have an identifiable cause, and more than 80 percent of the time, that cause is human. It gives wildfire a “whodunit” aspect where those affected can hunt for someone to blame, compared to the “Act of God” basis of a tornado or hurricane. Efstathiou’s research found the assumption often led to controversial accusations of arson or mismanagement.
The second factor is the duration of wildfires. Whereas an earthquake occurs in a few seconds and a hurricane may grind over a coastline for a day, wildfires commonly burn for weeks or months at a time. And given the potential for wildfire smoke to travel continental distances, a place that’s not actively threatened by fire can still suffer dangerous air quality throughout a regional fire season.
Efstathiou noted that the typical fire season often coincides with vacation season, which raises two challenges: People are often disconnected from their regular sources of reliable information, and the news media covering the fires is often short-staffed or relying on its most inexperienced journalists to process a rush of details and updates.
Wildfires have an identifiable cause, and more than 80 percent of the time, that cause is human.
Then there’s the third big factor of wildfire misunderstanding: the tendency to ignore it before and after the flames appear. Getting residents in the wildland-urban interface to attend risk-management workshops in advance, or to study the impacts and lessons left after a “season-ending event” such as snowfall snuffs the blaze, consistently leaves people unprepared for the next emergency.
And finally, Efstathiou said explaining wildfire requires grappling with several confusing paradoxes. What’s officially known as the “Wildfire Paradox” comes from research showing that increased effort to put out wildfires tends to create fuel build-ups that make future wildfires much worse. A related conundrum finds that both prevention activity and prevention inactivity can increase fire risk, depending on local conditions.
Perhaps most troubling for getting accurate wildfire information is what Efstathiou called the “arsonist mirage.” This comes from the increasing frequency of large wildfires to produce ember storms which can ignite new fires miles from the main fire perimeter. This spurs misinformation as observers try to interpret patterns of destruction that seem unrelated to the original incident.
“Misinformation is something that follows wildfires globally,” Efstathiou said. “And it doesn’t need to be a crazy conspiracy to be misinformation.”
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Unreliable social media and misinformation led to the creation of Watch Duty, a wildfire information app now providing real-time data to about 6.5 million users, including Mountain Journal’s website. The service started in 2021, after co-founder and CEO John Clarke Mills experienced a wildfire evacuation from his home near Sonoma, California.
“He was only getting one update a day from official agencies, which isn’t enough when you’re getting evacuated from your home,” Watch Duty community manager Katlyn Cummings told Mountain Journal. “He was looking at Facebook and Twitter and seeing lots of conspiracy theories. So he got together a team of engineers and folks reporting on wildfires.”
From coverage of just three California counties in 2021, Watch Duty now has approximately 300 volunteers monitoring 1,476 counties in 22 states around the clock. Cummings said the full-time staff of 20 includes one person in New Zealand who monitors overnight activity in the United States.
The volunteer contributors and reporters go through extensive training and a background check before being approved to post updates to the website and app. Their backgrounds range from photographers and weather watchers to current and retired wildland firefighters and law enforcement officers. The data they relay comes from a mix of radio dispatches (a common feature in California) to official reports and community updates from fire agency officials in the field (more typical in Greater Yellowstone). The 501(c)(3) nonprofit is funded through membership fees and donations.
“We have no ads,” Cummings said. “We don’t want an ad to pop up while someone is trying to evacuate from their home. That will never be in the ethos.”
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Services such as Watch Duty and the National Interagency Fire Center specialize in that real-time wildfire information. They don’t offer what Efstathiou called “the boring part” of wildfire coverage: the stuff that happens before and after an ignition becomes a situation. Some of those things, such as delayed health impacts, are just as dangerous to people’s safety as the flames themselves.
Loretta Mickley is an atmospheric chemist at Harvard University studying the characteristics of wildfire smoke and its impact on human health. In addition to tracking how smoke can affect lung performance and even mental decision-making, her research shows the composition of wildfire smoke has become more dangerous over time.
“Breathing wildfire smoke can have short-term and long-term health impacts,” Mickley told Mountain Journal. “You get a big dose today, and you may feel ‘off’ in the coming weeks. But you’re also more vulnerable to things like cardiovascular disease in years to come.”
The “Wildfire Paradox” comes from research showing that increased effort to put out wildfires tends to create fuel build-ups that make future wildfires much worse.
Much of past wildfire-smoke research focused on organic carbon chemicals and black carbon (soot) given off by burning forests. Fire reduces those substances to microscopic particles. When they get smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter, referred to as PM2.5, they can easily pass through the lungs to the bloodstream, and even penetrate the brain.
Mickley said the overall increase in North American burned acreage since 1985 has a more worrisome component: It’s not just forests burning. As fires have ravaged the WUI, burning homes released a new collection of toxic ingredients including chlorine, lead, PFAS and fungal spores in the smoke plumes. Where the plant-based compounds aggravated asthma, lung disease and heart conditions, these additional toxins can lead to birth defects, systemic inflammation and fungal diseases.
And the problem isn’t restricted to places near active flames. So far in 2025, Canada has logged its second-worst fire season in its history. That’s just behind 2023, which Mickley noted burned an area three or four times the size of her home state of Massachusetts.
But these fires also directly affected Massachusetts and other parts of the United States when Canadian smoke plumes mashed air quality monitors south of the border.
“Continental smoke plumes often do not affect surface air,” Mickley said. “But the August 6 [2025] Canadian smoke definitely affected ground-level air quality in the Northeast.”
The expanding complexity of wildfire science has added to the burden of wildfire communicators. At the Greater Yellowstone Fire Action Network, Davy said she hired a communications specialist to help her reach audiences better. While she and others in the network had decades of experience fighting fire, transmitting their knowledge was often a challenge.
“Sometimes we don’t know how to get away from our fed-speak, our fire-speak,” Davy said. “We can say that the air quality is maroon — what the heck does that mean? It means if you’re compromised by smoke, you should only go from filtered room to filtered room and kids don’t play outside.”
