Fighting Fire With Fire: BLM Battles Wildland Fire Effectively Through Education, Collaboration and Restoration Efforts Guest Editorial By Ron Wenker State Director BLM Nevada Over the last decade, BLM has fought 28,389 fires in 13 western states ? and which state leads the pack for number of fires? Nevada, with 17 percent of the total. So, it?s no surprise that when looking at total acres burned across all 13 states, Nevada also ranks number one with almost one-third of the total number of acres burned in the past 10 years. That?s more than 6,083,000 acres burned since 1999, and 95 percent of it was natural-caused. So, how does BLM Nevada, its agency partners and the communities and individual homeowners it serves, handle being number one in such devastating categories? Through education, collaboration and streamlined efforts, BLM ensures: prevention efforts occur; habitat restoration and preservation for a variety of species happen; and fire fighting is a multi-agency, cooperative endeavor. Mutual Aid Agreements: The cost of wildland fire suppression continues to increase, straining resources and presenting additional financial challenges. The use of cooperative mutual aid agreements allows agencies to share resources across jurisdictional boundaries for a specific amount of time usually during the first 24 hours without financial reimbursement. Agency Partnerships: BLM and the Forest Service are working collaboratively to cut costs by blending staffs to reducing overhead. For example, personnel from each agency may be rolling on the same truck. In Elko, BLM and the Forest Service have a ?Service First? agreement, which reduces overhead costs for staffing. For example, there will be one fire management officer for the area instead of one fire management office for each agency in the area. Living With Fire: BLM works extensively with the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension?s Living With Fire program, which was developed to inform Nevadans about how they can live more safely in high fire hazard environments. The purpose of Living With Fire is to teach people how to safely coexist with wildfire when it does occur. Read the rest by subscribing to NWW! © 2009 joyce communications