The Man With the Drip Torch and 36 Hours

Dutch Kessler is a hypothetical prescribed-burn practitioner, a composite figure who, as far as we can determine, is the only burn boss in the American West willing to say everything the real ones are thinking. He operates a small prescribed fire cooperative in eastern Oregon, serving ranchers, tribal partners, and conservation landowners. He left the U.S. Forest Service after 18 years. He holds an RXB2 qualification. Under Oregon law, he is personally liable if a burn he leads escapes and causes damage, including the cost of suppressing it.¹ He agreed to this conversation on the condition that we acknowledge he doesn't exist, which, he noted, "is the only reason I can talk like a human being."

In May 2022, Forest Service Chief Randy Moore did something no chief had done before. He paused every prescribed burn on every national forest in the country. All of them.

The Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, a prescribed burn that escaped in the Santa Fe National Forest, had merged with a smoldering pile burn the agency hadn't properly extinguished and become the largest wildfire in New Mexico history. More than 300,000 acres burned. Nearly 1,500 structures destroyed.² Congress would eventually set aside more than $5 billion to compensate victims.³

It was the second time a prescribed burn escape in New Mexico had triggered a national reckoning. In 2000, the Cerro Grande fire, a National Park Service prescribed burn at Bandelier National Monument, burned 48,000 acres, evacuated 18,000 residents, and caused roughly $1 billion in damage. The GAO investigated it hour by hour. Many of the reforms it recommended (peer review, documented go/no-go decisions, clearer contingency resources) are structurally identical to what the Forest Service promised after Hermit's Peak, twenty-two years later.⁴

Meanwhile, the science has only sharpened. A 2023 study in Communications Earth and Environment found that approximately 2°C of warming will reduce suitable prescribed burn days across the western U.S. by 17 percent overall, with spring windows shrinking by 25 percent and summer windows by 31 percent.⁵ The Forest Service's own Wildfire Crisis Strategy calls for treating 50 million additional acres over the next decade.⁶ The gap between what the landscape needs and what the system permits is widening in both directions at once.

We spoke with Kessler in late September, during what he called "the part of fall where you're either burning or losing your mind."

You left the Forest Service after 18 years. What broke?

Dutch: Nothing broke. The whole thing calcified. I watched the system get slower and more afraid after every incident, and I understood why. Cerro Grande, then Hermit's Peak. But understanding why doesn't change the fact that the landscape doesn't care about your review process. The fuels are still building. I left because I wanted to actually put fire on the ground, and I realized I could do more of that working with ranchers and tribes than I could inside the agency.

Which is a damning thing to say about the institution that manages 193 million acres of national forest. I know that.

Walk us through a burn day.

Dutch: You're juggling five things that have to line up at once, and none of them talk to each other. You've got the weather window: the humidity, wind speed, temperature all have to fall inside your prescription, and those windows might last 36 hours or they might last four. You've got the air quality permit, which in Oregon means the smoke management forecast can shut you down the morning of, regardless of what the weather's doing.⁷ You've got your crew, which took you months to assemble because everyone qualified is either fighting a wildfire somewhere or burned out from fighting a wildfire somewhere. You've got the landowner standing there watching you set their property on fire on purpose, which is a social dynamic nobody trains you for. And underneath all of it, you've got the fuel load, which gets worse every day you don't burn.

So you're standing there with a drip torch and you're thinking: the weather's marginal but acceptable, the air quality permit could get pulled in two hours, my crew lead is exhausted, and if I don't burn this unit today I might not get another window until spring. By spring the grass will be different and the prescription won't apply and we'll have to rewrite the plan. That's your Tuesday.

The GAO found that burn bosses "frequently felt pressure to ignite within limited burn windows due to aggressive forest management goals or to avoid losing funding."⁸ Does that match your experience?

Dutch: Yeah. And I want to be careful here because the way that sentence reads, it sounds like recklessness. It isn't. The system creates a situation where saying "no, not today" has real consequences. You lose the window, you lose the funding cycle, you lose the crew availability, and the treatment doesn't happen. And the treatment not happening is also a risk. That's the part that never shows up in the post-incident reviews. Nobody writes a report about the fire you didn't light and the wildfire that burned through that unit three years later because the fuels were never treated.

The accountability is perfectly asymmetric. Light a fire that escapes: congressional hearings, $5 billion in compensation, your name in the investigation report. Don't light a fire and let the fuels build until lightning does it for you: nothing. No report. No hearing. Just a wildfire that everyone treats as an act of God.

You carry personal liability as a private operator. How does that shape your decision-making?

Dutch: Every single day. Oregon's a simple negligence state, which means if my burn escapes and causes damage, I'm liable if someone can show I failed to take reasonable actions to prevent it. And I'm liable for suppression costs. Not just property damage. The bill for the engines and the helicopters.¹

The statistical risk is low. Something like a 1.5 percent escape rate in the Great Plains data, zero lawsuits out of 23,000 burns.⁹ But Hermit's Peak is $5 billion. The math doesn't work like normal math works. You're not playing the average. You're playing the tail. I tell people it's like being a pilot who's also personally liable for the plane. You fly conservatively.

How has Hermit's Peak changed the way you operate?

Dutch: It made everyone more careful, which was appropriate. And it made the system more afraid, which was understandable but operationally devastating. The 90-day pause in 2022 shut down prescribed fire nationally during an active burn window.² The new requirements, more modeling, more weather stations, more supervisor sign-offs, they're all reasonable individually. But they stack. Each one adds time and complexity to a process that's already fighting a shrinking window.

And here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud. Cerro Grande was 2000. The GAO did a full investigation. Peer review requirements, documented go/no-go, clearer contingency resources.⁴ Twenty-two years later, Hermit's Peak happens, and the review finds basically the same problems: "can-do attitudes," insufficient recognition of early warning signs, conditions drier than recognized.¹⁰

So either the reforms didn't work, or the problem isn't the kind that reforms fix.

Which is it?

Dutch: The landscape evolved with fire over thousands of years. We spent a century removing it. Now we're trying to put it back under conditions that are harder than they've ever been, inside institutions that respond to failure by adding process. Process takes time. Time is the thing you don't have. Climate change is taking more of it away every year: 17 percent fewer burn days by 2060, spring windows down 25 percent.⁵

There are roughly 300 qualified burn bosses in all of California.¹¹ It takes eight to fifteen years to certify one.¹² How does the pipeline look from where you sit?

Dutch: You can become a doctor faster. That's not my line, that's a Washington DNR manager.¹² And the Forest Service lost nearly half its permanent employees between 2021 and 2024.¹³ So you've got a certification process that takes a decade, a workforce that's hemorrhaging, and burn season competing directly with fire season for the same people.

My crew lead last spring got pulled to a wildfire assignment in week two of our burn window. Just gone. He's not coming back until September, and by September the prescription's expired. I can't be mad at him. He's doing the job. But I'm standing there with a burn plan, a weather window, and half a crew, and the unit doesn't get treated. Again.

What do you want people to understand about what you do?

Dutch: That I'm returning fire, not fighting it. The landscape where I work evolved with fire, and we spent a century removing it, and now every year I don't burn a unit, the fuel load grows. The eventual fire, the one nobody planned, the one that starts from lightning or a downed power line, gets worse. That's not a hypothetical. That's the documented trajectory.⁶

The Docket's dual feature on Florida's prescribed fire system, the institutional and legal architecture that has made the Southeast the national exception, publishes next month.

Footnotes

1. Oregon State University Extension, "Prescribed fire basics: Liability in Oregon." https://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/pub/em-9390-prescribed-fire-basics-liability-oregon ↩ ↩²

2. USDA Forest Service, National Prescribed Fire Program Review, September 2022. https://www.frames.gov/documents/usfs/USFS_20220908_National-Prescribed-Fire-Program-Review.pdf ↩ ↩²

3. KRQE, "Judge rules Hermits Peak Calf Canyon Fire victims must be compensated for non-economic damages." https://www.krqe.com/news/new-mexico/judge-rules-hermits-peak-calf-canyon-fire-victims-must-be-compensated-for-non-economic-damages/ ↩

4. GAO investigation of Cerro Grande (2000), documented in The Docket's historical-adaptation-cases archive. ↩ ↩²

5. Swain, D.L., et al., "Climate change is narrowing and shifting prescribed fire windows in western United States," Communications Earth and Environment 4:340 (2023). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11041722/ ↩ ↩²

6. USDA Forest Service, FY22 Prescribed Burns Report. https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/fy22-prescribed-burns-report.pdf ↩ ↩²

7. FRAMES, "Wildland Fire Smoke Management Plans and Resources." https://www.frames.gov/smoke/management/plans-and-resources ↩

8. GAO, 2024 report on Forest Service prescribed fire implementation, via Missoula Current. https://missoulacurrent.com/shortage-prescribed-burns/ ↩

9. Washington DNR, "Prescribed Fire: Understanding Liability, Laws and Risk." https://dnr.wa.gov/sites/default/files/2025-05/rp_cb_understanding_liability.pdf ↩

10. Fire Adapted NM, "Wildfire Wednesdays #141." https://facnm.org/news/2024/8/21/wildfire-wednesdays-141-hermits-peakcalf-canyon-fire ↩

11. Center for Ecosystem Policy and Practice, "Scaling California's Prescribed Fire Workforce," 2026. https://cepp.substack.com/p/how-many-people-will-it-take-to-treat ↩

12. Spokesman-Review, "The bureaucracy of burning," February 2024. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2024/feb/13/the-bureaucracy-of-burning-washington-dnr-hopes-st/ ↩ ↩²

13. Grist, "Firefighters sound alarm as US faces critical staffing shortage," 2026. https://grist.org/wildfires/firefighters-sound-alarm-as-us-faces-critical-staffing-shortage-we-dont-have-enough-people/ ↩