Last week The Arizona Republic published a story that alleged Grand Canyon National Park officials didn’t follow parts of their own wildfire management plan in the days leading up to the Dragon Bravo Fire exploding in size.
The piece prompted Governor Katie Hobbs to renew her calls for an investigation into the blaze that’s the largest-known wildfire in the Grand Canyon and the seventh biggest in recorded Arizona history.
KNAU asked Grand Canyon National Park to comment on the Republic’s story. They didn’t respond.
KNAU’s Adrian Skabelund spoke with the Republic reporters, Stephanie Murray and Robert Anglen, who broke the story.
ADRIAN SKABELUND: What did the fire management plan outline as what should have occurred and how did that conflict with what was actually happening in the days leading up to that fire?
ROBERT ANGLEN: The fire management plan has four set criteria. It's temperature, it's humidity, it's wind speed, and wind gust. They call them “critical local thresholds.” So if these four things are met, you have a potential of a very bad fire.
The Park Service was telling people that the fire was controlled, that they were managing it under a contain and confine strategy, and they had nothing to worry about.
STEPHANIE MURRAY: The weather started to approach these dangerous critical thresholds as early as two days after that fire was sparked by a lightning strike on July 4. On July 6, the temperature and a few other weather factors were kind of dancing around these critical thresholds, getting close to them.
On July 9, that happened again.
And then on July 10, three of the critical thresholds were exceeded, and that's: temperatures above 70 degrees, a humidity level below 15%, wind gusts above 15 miles per hour, and wind speeds above 10 miles per hour. The weather hit three of those. And the last one, the wind speed, it was only two miles per hour off from meeting that one, a whole day before the National Park Service said that this fire had gotten away from them.
I think of a metaphor of, kind of, four big red warning lights. There were three that were on, metaphorically, and the fourth one was almost there a day before this fire got out of control.
SKABELUND: What is the park's reaction to the story been?
MURRAY: The park's reaction has been silence. We gave them a number of opportunities to talk to us about this fire plan, to comment on this story, and we haven't heard much at all.
ANGLEN: But one of the things that's curious, or maddening depending on who you are, is the singular response from the Park Service that they claim to have been managing the fire in a suppression strategy all along. So they're telling people that their goal at the beginning and the outset of this fire was to suppress it.
That is simply not true. Post after post on social media, their public presence, they were talking about how they were letting it burn natural fuel, you know, brush and trees that needed to be thinned out. And they said that day after day after day. And what emerges is, the first time they used the word suppression in these public announcements was four hours before the Grand Canyon Lodge burned to the ground.
SKABELUND: What was your main takeaway from the reporting that you did for this story?
MURRAY: I was pretty blown away after looking at this fire management plan and then pulling up that National Weather Service data and looking for those critical thresholds. Those jumped off the page at me right away.
I had talked to a retired wildfire firefighter who had told me that weather is really one of the most important things to look at when you're dealing with a fire like this. And that really rang true to me as we were looking through this data, trying to piece together what happened.
ANGLEN: The top line for me is mismanagement. These plans are built years in advance. In fact, one of the issues we raised about the plan was that they rely a lot on 2012 data, and the plan was updated in 2025, or at least reviewed, and they just didn't follow their own guidelines in the approach to this fire.
But more than that, they told the public everything was great while it wasn't. The inferno that emerged was essentially inevitable and predicted by their own plans.
SKABELUND: Thank you both so much for giving me some of your time today.
MURRAY: Yeah, thank you.
ANGLEN: Thank you.
