I do prescribed burning privately as part of my living. I broadcast burn thousands of acres of logging slash every year and even more acres worth of landing and unit piles. There are several things happening here. Yes, the forest service are generally morons with fire as they are with everything. They have become so safety focused that they can barely accomplish anything on a consistent basis so their staff lack experience. They operate by checklists and modeled/predicted fire behavior and the less fire they actually used the more separated their modeling gets from reality. To prescribe burn successfully on a large scale you have to do it a lot to get real experience of how fire behaves and how to control it. In order to burn a lot you have to be able to make small mistakes, small being very relative. The wildfire the USFS lit last spring with their prescribed burns in New Mexico was not a relatively small mistake. 10 years ago in the PNW it was standard practice on industrial forest ground, as well as most state agencies and some federal ground to broadcast burn almost all logging units to remove the residual slash thereby reducing the potential for damaging wildfire and to create good space to plant trees. At that time, you could make small mistakes. Fire is very volatile and the forest is not a static environment. Over the course of burning thousands of acres, fire will inevitably cross lines and slop over into areas that were not intended to be burned. We used to just clean it up and carry on and replant the neighbor's property. And the neighbors would do the same. That's how you practice and learn. Now, more and more people live in the woods and the wildland-urban-interface is growing all the time. There are more values like structures and managed private property in the vicinity of forest ground that needs prescribed fire. And many people who have moved into the woods do not understand fire and will try mightily and usually successfully to get prescribed burning in their area shut down because they don't like the smoke. At the same time, it is less acceptable in the industry and bordering on not acceptable at all for fire to cross property lines. Insurance gets involved immediately and the inflated costs of rehabbing accidentally burned areas outweigh the benefit of the burn for many landowners. Industrial landowners are also using other bogus methods like building small dip ponds and installing more gates and claiming that they have mitigated the risk of their logging slash by controlling access and enhancing suppression efforts. The fact is that the slash remains and when it burns it burns hotter than ever. So today, people prescribe fire as a silvicultural treatment less and less. Private foresters have less experience with prescribed fire. Agency foresters are often excluded from fire and wildland firefighting personnel attempt to implement burns for which they lack real-time experience. Firefighters are not foresters anymore. They do not understand how fire works outside of wildland firefighting conditions which are very different from prescribed burning conditions. It's a bad situation. As somone that works with fire on a large scale, what scares me here is that this guy ostensibly followed all the established rules and guidelines set by the relevant agencies for igniting a prescribed fire, had a fire escape that in my mind is not outrageously out of the scope of what happens with prescribed burning, and was still arrested. Damned if you don't implement fire and gain experience, double damned if you make a mistake these days. Now if fuel or weather conditions were outside his prescriptions, that's another problem and he's fucked.