LAKE TAHOE, Nev./Calif. – Smoke may start to arise on the west shore of Tahoe as the Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team begins its fall prescribed fire program on Tuesday, Sept. 24.

If conditions and weather are favorable, California State Parks will conduct an understory burn at the entrance to Sugar Pine Point State Park on Lake Tahoe’s west shore. 

This may come as a surprise as the basin and surrounding communities are just starting to relax after the Davis Fire in recent weeks burned thousands of acres at Tahoe’s doorstep near Mt. Rose. Even closer, a lightening strike caused the small Kings Fire above Incline Village last week, but agencies are on course with typical prescribed burn schedules.

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“It’s pretty common that we burn what’s called in-season,” Lisa Herron with the USDA Forest Service Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit explains. “And that basically means we’re still burning even though it’s fire season.”

The window to do these prescribed burns is very small, whether it’s pile burns or using a low intensity fire to remove fuels in a predetermined area, known as an understory burn.

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“So, anytime the conditions come together and allow us to get out and burn,” the public affairs specialist says, “we burn.”

But before doing so, burn bosses and specialists take factors such as temperature, humidity, wind, and vegetation moisture into consideration.

“There’s a lot of factors that go in to decide where they’re going to burn and when and that’s why they call it prescribed fire,” Herron says, “because it has to meet that prescription before they actually put fire on the ground.”

These prescriptions may take place any time of the year when conditions are favorable. Even if it may still feel like fire season, because what fire experts consider fire season has changed in the last decade.

Now, it’s called fire year. “And the reason that that has changed is we’ve seen a lot more fires happening year-round,” Herron says.

Fuels reduction teams take many precautions when creating their burn plan to avoid burning out of control and there is a magnitude of science that goes into it.

“We only want to burn when conditions are right so that we can carry it out safely without any fear of it getting out of control,” Herron explains. “The firefighters who implement these burns,” she adds, “they don’t want it to happen because they’re going to be the ones on the hook for putting it out if that does happen.”

Tahoelivingwithfire.com is a resource anyone can check to find out what what prescribed burns are in their area. Herron says people can alway call 911 if they are not sure if the smoke if from a prescribed burn.

“We’d rather have them call 911 and be mistaken than it actually be fire.”

Agencies also coordinate with local and state air quality agencies to monitor weather for favorable conditions that will disperse smoke.

Before fully implementing the prescribed burn, crews conduct a test burn first to ensure it is burning as expected.

The forest service expects smoke from the Sugar Pine Point State Park burn to travel in the northeast direction.

For helpful smoke management tips, go to airnow.gov/air-quality-and-health/fires-and-your-health. The current air quality index is available at AirNow.gov.

To be added to the prescribed fire notification list, email sm.fs.paltbmu@usda.gov.