"When U.S. Forest Service personnel started a prescribed burn in a national forest in rural Oregon on Wednesday, Tonna and Mandy Holliday were scared. The sisters, who run the Windy Point Cattle Co., lived nearby and knew conditions were dry.
By the end of the day, the prescribed burn escaped the Malheur National Forest, jumped over county road 63, and burned up a swath of their timber land and grazing pasture. They called 911 and soon the U.S. Forest Service burn boss was on his way to jail.
The arrest of a Forest Service employee is exceedingly rare, according to former Forest Service officials and other experts, and it has become a fresh source of tension in a part of the country with a history of animosity toward the federal government.
The sheriff’s office in Grant County, Ore., on Wednesday arrested Rick Snodgrass, a 39-year-old Forest Service employee, for “reckless burning,” after a prescribed fire in the Malheur National Forest burned onto the Hollidays’ ranch. Temperatures exceeded 70 degrees that afternoon and Sheriff Todd McKinley told Wildfire Today that “everybody knew it was a bad burn, should not be happening.”"
Joshua Partlow reports for the Washington Post October 21, 2022.
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