Blackfeet seek $60 million for fire

The Blackfeet Tribe is suing for $60 million for damages caused by a wildfire in 2006 that started in Glacier National Park and spread into the reservation, burning 19,000 acres.

The lawsuit, filed last June in the U.S. Court of Claims in Washington, D.C., is against the United States of America, not the Park Service. The 11-page document also blames the federal government for not adequately funding programs that would have allowed better forest management on tribal lands.

The Red Eagle Lake Fire started July 28, 2006 near Red Eagle Lake in the St. Mary drainage. Stoked by high winds and dry, beetle-killed fuels, the fire quickly spread to the east and outside the Park, forcing the temporary evacuation of the St. Mary town site. All told, the fire burned more than 32,000 acres.

“Had the United States performed reasonable fuel treatments and manipulations to Glacier National Park’s boundary lands, contiguous to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, the Red Eagle Fire would not have spread onto the Blackfeet Reservation and damaged the Tribe’s forest trust lands,” the lawsuit says.

The suit also claims that federal funding for Indian forests is “substantially less than that available to adjacent state and private owners,” and that “hazardous fuels reduction on Indian forest remained lower than needed.”

The government responded to the suit in November, denying the allegations as well as claiming the Blackfeet filed their suit too late and beyond the statute of limitations.

The National Park Service does not actively manage its forests with mechanical means like logging. The backcountry region where the Red Eagle Fire started is managed as wilderness, where logging and other mechanical management is generally not allowed, save for cutting down the occasional hazard tree near a campground or clearing downed trees on trails.

The Park has a fire management plan, completed in 2010, which allows for mechanical fuel treatments but only “according to cost effectiveness and impact to the resource.”

In the past, NPS has used prescribed, intentionally set, fires to manage some of its grassland habitat, particularly in the North Fork area at Big Prairie.