Custer County fire warden: last summer's wildfires in NE Wyoming likely created hundreds of new coal seam fires

GILLETTE — The 2024 fire season in northeast Wyoming likely started hundreds of new coal seam fires in Campbell, Sheridan and Johnson counties.

The three counties are on track to apply for a federal grant to help pay for the mapping of about 3 million acres to see just how many coal seam fires are out there.

The joint application for a $1 million FEMA grant, run through Wyoming Homeland Security, was slated for consideration by the Campbell County Commissioners at their meeting on Tuesday. 

The county commissioners in Sheridan and Johnson counties also will vote on the application.

The project would map 1.5 million acres in Campbell County north of Interstate 90. It would include everything to the Montana border. Of that, 1.2 million acres are on private land, 173,000 acres are on BLM land, 96,000 acres are state land and 50,000 is U.S. Forest Service land, said Kristin Young, the deputy director of administration for Campbell County.

It also would map 1 million acres in Sheridan County and 500,000 acres in Johnson County. The mapping would take place during the winter, which is the best time of the year for these coal seam fires to be mapped.

The county held a special meeting last week for landowners and other stakeholders to talk about the grant and the mapping project.

Cory Cheugis, fire warden for Custer County, Montana, spoke for a bit on the process that he went through to map out the coal seam fires in eastern Montana. It was a big problem that had previously been dealt with on a case-by-case basis. But it eventually got so big that the strategy had to change.

He said 260,000 acres burned in eastern Montana in 2021, and of that, 201,000 of the burned acres were from fires caused by coal seams. It was devastating to the agricultural producers, who were the No. 1 economic contributor in that part of Montana.

So the county got a grant to pay for mapping of coal seam fires. Once the mapping was done, it looked into different mitigation strategies. Counties can’t get the dollars to stop the coal seam fires if they don’t have the data to back it up, Cheugis said.

Cheugis said the Short Draw Fire, which started in northern Campbell County and moved into Montana, burning nearly 35,000 acres, started 233 new coal seam fires. These new fires will likely cause problems for eastern Montana and northern Wyoming in the future, he added.

“That’s 233 unattended campfires sitting out there waiting for a hot windy day to take it away,” Cheugis said. “It’s not if, it’s when. Unfortunately, the wind usually comes out of the northwest, so you’re going to catch some fires in the next few years coming in from the Montana side.”

That’s more than 200 new fires from one new fire. With the historic wildfire season that northeast Wyoming had, Cheugis said, “I’ll bet you got 1,500 new coal seams burning across these three counties.”

“We need to be proactive instead of reactive,” he said. “We were reactive for so many years…that’s why we’re in the situation we’re in now. You guys have a golden opportunity to be ahead of the game, for the most part, getting it mapped and start looking for funding.”

Todd Yeager with the BLM field office in Buffalo said his department is “on board here to work together on this to try and find a solution.”

“We will cooperate with the counties, with the private landowners and everybody,” Yeager said.

Once all the fires have been mapped, there is funding available that the counties can go after to help pay for putting out the fires.

“Burying it with a dozer doesn’t really work,” Cheugis said. “If it gets any oxygen, it’ll eventually come back.”

This story was published on May 31, 2025.