In 1996 Flagstaff, Arizona was acknowledged by then Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, as an example of community fire prevention. How will practices adopted from the Flagstaff Plan impact the wildland/urban interface?

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Ponderosa Pine Management Conference, Fort Valley Experimental Forest, Arizona, 1944.
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Two fire fighters set the ground fuels afire with the aid of drip torches during a prescribed burn on the Coconino National Forest near Highway 180, July 19, 2001.
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Slash pile created from thinning the thick stands of ponderosa pine in an urban area of Flagstaff, June 26, 2001.
Paul Summerfelt

Paul Summerfelt
Fuel Management Officer, City of Flagstaff

"When [the new Flagstaff fire chief] arrived in town he asked some people in the fire department at that point to please tell him about the fuel management program… They quickly responded that he didn't need to worry, because they didn't use a lot of diesel in their trucks."

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"We recognized that with the media scripting that was going on in Los Alamos, with the secretary of Interior saying we needed to do more of what was going on in Flagstaff, we were going to get approached quickly by a lot of media—national media is what it [the Flagstaff plan] was—and we had to be able to explain."

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Bill Bishop

Bill Bishop
Past supervisor of one of Arizona's first Hotshot crews during the 1970s

"The forest was allowed to get so far away from what was natural, that I think it needs man to kind of push it back that direction a little bit."

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