A friend/former co-worker is in your neck of the woods on a prevention assignment (he's still with USFS, I left 3.5 years ago to pursue helping communities and landowners adapt to, live with, and use fire safely).
Looking at some of the gov bidding sites I see some NM areas (Santa Fe) looking for Community Wildfire Protection Plans. Folks are taking notice and on the path of taking action.
You can't prevent all wildfires, nor is that 100% ecologically desirable, but you can and should PREPARE for wildfires.
One note: your tone seems to question the finding of a lightning start. "Sleeper" fires, those that smolder unseen until rh drops and the wind picks up, are a fairly common occurrence. My first duty station on the Sequoia NF in Central California, we had "sleeper" starts that would take a day or two to pop up, but you correlate the origin with the lightning map, and usually at least with tree strikes there's scarring (or flat explosion of parts of the tree) that make the finding definitive. On the Malheur NF in Northeastern Oregon, which is dry-dry-dry forest for the most part, we had a record breaking 21-day sleeper, where it took THREE WEEKS for the fire to put up enough smoke to be seen by the fire lookout for that area.
A friend/former co-worker is in your neck of the woods on a prevention assignment (he's still with USFS, I left 3.5 years ago to pursue helping communities and landowners adapt to, live with, and use fire safely).
Looking at some of the gov bidding sites I see some NM areas (Santa Fe) looking for Community Wildfire Protection Plans. Folks are taking notice and on the path of taking action.
You can't prevent all wildfires, nor is that 100% ecologically desirable, but you can and should PREPARE for wildfires.
One note: your tone seems to question the finding of a lightning start. "Sleeper" fires, those that smolder unseen until rh drops and the wind picks up, are a fairly common occurrence. My first duty station on the Sequoia NF in Central California, we had "sleeper" starts that would take a day or two to pop up, but you correlate the origin with the lightning map, and usually at least with tree strikes there's scarring (or flat explosion of parts of the tree) that make the finding definitive. On the Malheur NF in Northeastern Oregon, which is dry-dry-dry forest for the most part, we had a record breaking 21-day sleeper, where it took THREE WEEKS for the fire to put up enough smoke to be seen by the fire lookout for that area.