This coming Saturday (September 27th) marks one year since the Elk Fire was discovered, and work continues to assess, repair, and clean up the damage.
The lightning-caused fire destroyed over 98 thousand acres of land, primarily on the eastern face of the Bighorn Mountains and in the Bighorn National Forest.
Since then, the Sheridan County Conservation District has been working to clean up and assess the damage.
Additional water testing, debris and sediment removal, reservoir cleanup, and irrigation infrastructure repair are among the tasks assigned.
District Manager Carrie Rogaczewski says that while fire recovery and prevention work is not something the district is used to, the name of the game for a conversation district is to be able to address emerging issues as they arise.
“When new projects come up, like fire stuff, we are positioned in a way that we can kind of do a little bit of a pivot and pull together what we can. We have experience managing grants, we have relationships with some of those granting entities. We had the infrastructure, the administration capacity already kind of set up so we could hit the ground running.”
Rogaczewski adds that the District received approximately $160,000 for fire mitigation work, $58,000 for watershed assessment work, and $50,000 for additional water quality monitoring.
