Wildfires are ripping across the Great Plains, and other flare-ups are popping up in Arizona and Colorado remarkably early in the season. Firefighters and experts are watching these giant red splotches of burning forest and grasslands with alarm, warning that the timing, ingredients fueling their startling growth, and what they signal about the fire season ahead is a recipe for concern — perhaps signaling an expanding frontier for fire risk in broader patches of the western half of the United States.
“To sum it up,” Pete Curran, a staff meteorologist for Watch Duty, a nonprofit that tracks wildfires live and sends updates to users in real time, and former captain at the Orange County Fire Authority, put it bluntly: “We are scared s—less.”
“To have any fire that goes hundreds of thousands of acres in a day anywhere is very unusual at any time of the year, let alone in mid-March,” he added about the blazes in Nebraska. “It got everyone’s attention.”
Many fire-prone parts of the country did not get a real, substantial winter, one that typically leaves mountains and soil with a solid snowpack to help cushion the transition into unrelenting summer heat. Combine that with the kind of dry cold fronts that brought powerful fire-igniting winds in late February in the Oklahoma Panhandle and southern Kansas; an unprecedented heat dome parked over a slew of states from California to the Great Plains that brought the country’s highest-ever March temperature; and wildfire crews already stretched thin. Meteorologists, climate scientists and firefighters who monitor such activity closely are already calculating how they can spread their resources across regions if these kinds of fires begin to pop off simultaneously.
The lack of seasonal rain and snow has drastically dried out grasslands in places like Nebraska, which has vast, interrupted stretches of grass prairie lands, said Curran, who has been working in the wildfire space for 45 years. That has enabled blazes such as the record-breaking Morrill Fire to run fast and hard, burning 643,000 acres in a week and becoming not only the largest blaze in state history, but even topping some of California’s largest incidents.
Citing a recently released report about climate change in Nebraska, state climatologist Deborah Bathke said winter and spring temperatures have been rising there, and the western half of the state is seeing fewer days with snow on the ground because of decreasing precipitation — while wind gusts during March are growing more intense.
These climatic changes are consistent with increasing wildfire frequency and a lengthening season.
“These changes are expected to continue through the end of the century,” said Bathke.
Over the next few weeks, there’s little relief in the form of rain on the horizon for Nebraska. Another big surge of wind is expected Thursday and will be preceded by record heat on Wednesday. A recently updated seasonal outlook from the Climate Prediction Center expects more drought through June.
–
The Forest Service has been struggling with staffing and retention for years. In 2025, the agency lost 16 percent of its workforce largely due to cuts and buyout programs by the Trump administration’s U.S. DOGE Service. The Agriculture and Interior departments also cut thousands of workers. Such losses resulted in a 38 percent reduction in hazardous fuel work last year compared to the previous four years, according to the letter.
Paul Krugman recently commented that in the Trump Administration—all Republicans today, really—loyalty not only matters more than competence, but actually displaces competence, because a competent person might actually try to act responsibly at some point, and that is unacceptable.
So here we are.