When The Smoke Clears
Wildfire Recovery
Sept 2024
If you think House Draw Fire is old news, think again. It’s been just a few weeks since the flames were extinguished, but the aftermath? It’s just beginning to heat up. The House Draw fire was a record-breaker; the most significant single fire in Wyoming history. It scorched a mind-boggling 175,000 acres, that’s around 273 square miles – bigger than the Denver metropolitan area.
Now comes the enormous task of recovery. Nearly 85% of this land is privately owned, the bread and butter for about sixty landowners and producers. They’re now knee-deep in a maze of recovery efforts, navigating layers of bureaucratic red tape and figuring out a web of government and non-government aid programs. There is also the costly but necessary battle against unwelcome invasive species like leafy spurge, cheatgrass, and vendetta, which threaten both the land itself, and the producers’ livelihoods.
Join us as Johnson County Commission Chairman Bill Novotny unpacks the challenges that lie ahead. From the tangled webs of aid to the nitty-gritty of getting the producers back on their feet, find out what it will take for the whole community to bounce back from this massive wildfire.
