The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is taking steps to boost the use of prescribed burns to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires. On March 12, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency will begin revising a decades-old rule that he says has hindered controlled burning efforts.
Zeldin directed EPA staff to revisit the Exceptional Events rulemaking and prioritize allowing prescribed fires in state and Tribal Implementation Plans. The move comes as communities nationwide struggle to manage wildfire risks amid changing climate conditions.
“The Trump administration is tackling our emergency response duties head on and taking action to reduce the likelihood of these devastating disasters in the future,” Zeldin said. “EPA plays an important role in ensuring the best forest management practices while protecting human health and the environment. Revisiting this rulemaking will ensure that EPA doesn’t get in the way of making preventative efforts like prescribed burns easier to protect communities.”
Exceptional Events Rule
The Exceptional Events Rule is a provision under the Clean Air Act that allows states to exclude air pollution events from regulatory compliance calculations if they meet specific criteria.
Wildfires contribute significantly to air pollution, mainly through fine particulate matter, which can travel long distances and impact public health. The EPA has historically treated wildfires as exceptional events by default.
Unlike wildfires, prescribed burns do not automatically qualify as exceptional events. This is because prescribed burns are human-caused, likely to recur and technically preventable. EPA said under the Clean Air Act, an exceptional event must have “affected air quality in such a way that there exists a clear causal relationship between the specific event and the monitored exceedance or violation.” Additionally, it must have been “not reasonably controllable or preventable” and “caused by human activity that is unlikely to recur at a particular location or was a natural event.”
To meet the “not reasonably controllable or preventable” criterion, the EPA requires that enforceable control measures be considered “reasonable controls” if they meet specific conditions. These measures must be implemented as part of an approved State Implementation Plan (SIP), Federal Implementation Plan or Tribal Implementation Plan (TIP). Additionally, the EPA must have approved the plan within five years of the event, and it must address the pollutant in question while including all necessary sources to comply with the Clean Air Act.
For prescribed burns, compliance with an EPA-certified Smoke Management Program (SMP) or basic smoke management practices is required. SMPs must incorporate elements such as burn authorization, emission reduction strategies and public awareness initiatives. These programs must be state-certified and documented with the EPA, ensuring oversight while allowing flexibility for burn managers to adapt basic smoke management practices based on site conditions, technological advancements and evolving best practices.
To satisfy the “human activity unlikely to recur” criterion, land managers must document the frequency of burns and compare them to natural fire return intervals or the intervals needed to maintain a healthy ecosystem. Multi-year land management plans typically provide this information, and while the EPA considers these plans, the actual burn frequency does not need to match exactly.
For private landowners, a land or resource management plan can help demonstrate compliance with the rule if it includes the fire return interval for the area being burned. The plan must either reflect the natural interval or the frequency required to sustain the ecosystem. If a prescribed burn on private land contributes to an air quality exceedance, the plan must be referenced in an exceptional events demonstration to justify the burn’s recurrence as meeting the necessary criteria.
EPA said current regulations often create unnecessary burdens that make it difficult for states and tribes to implement these controlled burns without facing penalties in air quality assessments. Citing the recent wildfires in Los Angeles, CA, the agency said it would work with states to ensure they can use prescribed burns without being unfairly penalized in regulatory air quality assessments when reviewing SIPs and TIPs.
To further this effort, Zeldin has instructed the EPA Office of Air and Radiation to engage with state and Tribal air agencies and federal and local forest managers to identify ways to ease restrictive regulations that hinder prescribed fire use. Additionally, the EPA is reevaluating its Exceptional Events Rule to streamline the process for states to exclude wildfire-related pollution from air quality compliance calculations.
The goal is to simplify regulatory processes, as emphasized in President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14192, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” which aims to reduce regulatory barriers and promote cross-agency partnerships. — Charles Wallace, WLJ contributing editor
