The Laws of Fire in the Burning West

By Christian Galia. 

Wildfire is often labeled a natural disaster. In Arizona, however, it is just as much a legal and institutional phenomenon as it is a natural one. Long before flames approach a neighborhood, legal rules determine where homes may be built, which public agencies oversee at-risk landscapes, and what preventive measures utilities and local governments must undertake. After a fire, the law again takes the reins, determining who bears responsibility, what claims may be brought, and how losses are treated in an increasingly flammable West.

Arizona experiences many of the tensions that define wildfire governance in the West: the rapid growth of the wildland-urban interface (resident populations at imminent risk from wildfire); the tripartite land ownership; and the confluence of authority between federal, state, and tribal governments. As a result, wildfire policy in Arizona is just as much about zoning codes, infrastructure regulation, administrative procedure, and allocating risk across institutions and communities as it is about forests themselves.

The Legal Architecture of Fire Authority 

Arizona’s statutory framework begins with Title 37. The Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management (DFFM), under the state forester’s direction, holds defined responsibilities over state lands and certain categories of private lands. These duties extend beyond fire suppression. Under the Title, Arizona’s DFFM plans, coordinates, and provides wildfire-related advisory functions to various agencies and authorities. This broad mandate reflects an important premise: wildfire is not treated solely as an episodic emergency but as an ongoing governance challenge.

Some of the state’s most consequential wildfire decisions occur outside traditional forestry statutes. Municipal land-use authority plays a central role. Through zoning, cities and towns may designate hazard-sensitive districts and influence property development patterns in high-risk areas. A.R.S. § 9-463.01 allows local governments to impose requirements related to road access, infrastructure design, and expanding wildfire-prone developments. In practice, many of Arizona’s most significant fire-related decisions are made during permitting and planning.

Recent utility legislation reflects a similar evolution. Governor Hobbs signed H.B. 2201 in May 2025, which requires public power entities to develop wildfire mitigation plans and restructures civil liability standards for wildfire-related claims. When the bill was codified into law in September that year, it signaled a shift in policy priorities away from suppression and general utility negligence in the aftermath of a wildfire. Arizona now addresses wildfire through preventive governance mechanisms that define utility standards of care in advance and specify how risk is distributed.

Jurisdiction as a Practical Constraint

Even a well-designed statutory framework has to operate within jurisdictional bounds. In Arizona, wildfire authority is fragmented. State agencies have authority in some areas, tribal governments in others, and federal agencies control vast tracts of land that are critical to the state’s long-term fire outlook. This dispersion of authority is characteristic of Arizona land governance. But it complicates coordination and slows implementation in a state where 82% of land is not privately owned.

Arizona has attempted to navigate this fragmented system through Community Wildfire Protection Plans and cooperative restoration partnerships. Arizona’s Community Wildfire Protection Plan requires collaboration between the state and city governments to identify and mitigate wildfire risks local to each community. One size does not fit all, which is why cooperative restoration partnerships to heal Arizona’s forest land have the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service coordinate forest restoration projects with Arizona’s DFFM. 

In northern Arizona, the U.S. Forest Service manages extensive landscapes across the Coconino, Apache-Sitgreaves, and Tonto National Forests that affect fire risk. Even with Arizona’s DFFM coordination, the Four Forest Restoration Initiative’s Rim Country Environmental Impact Statement demonstrates how much Arizona’s wildfire trajectory depends on federal planning, review, and implementation processes. It lists over 136 relevant laws, policies, and agreements that delegate authority to different agencies for different actions requiring different review processes. Many disputes in Arizona, therefore, concern which decision-making process governs the response and how quickly it can move.

Liability and the Distribution of Loss

The legal system’s role is most obvious after homes burn and public costs escalate. Since enacting H.B. 2201 into Arizona law in September, 2025, wildfire-related claims largely operate under newly established utility-specific statutory rules.

Importantly, this chapter does not create a new cause of action against utilities. Instead, it specifies that an electric utility that complies with an approved wildfire mitigation plan satisfies the standard of care applicable to a reasonably prudent utility. A plaintiff must show that a utility’s failure to comply with that approved plan proximately caused the fire that damaged their life or property.  The statute further provides that noncompliance does not constitute negligence per se. It limits fault apportionment for ignition sources outside the utility’s control and certain vegetation risks beyond its right-of-way and significantly restricts punitive damages.

Taken together, these provisions shield utilities against the sword of wildfire litigation. The statute reflects a policy choice about how much exposure infrastructure providers should face in an era of heightened fire risk and about who ultimately absorbs residual losses, for better or for worse.

Rethinking Priorities

Arizona’s fire regime is particularly revealing of the need to mitigate conditions that amplify wildfire potency in the wake of the Dragon Bravo wildfire. The wildfire was contained, but then burned 149,399 acres around Grand Canyon National Park in drought conditions and cost $135 million to suppress. Arizona cannot eliminate wildfires. However, it’s important to structure a legal regime that delegates financial losses and most effectively reduces harm from the onset. 

Recent research highlights the rise in urban conflagrations, in which drought or human-caused activity ignites a fire, but wind conditions bring it into the wildland-urban interface, and structure-to-structure spread quickly drives large-scale destruction. If the vulnerability of buildings is a primary driver of loss, then home hardening, defensible space, ignition-resistant materials, and consistent local code compliance become core strategies rather than remedial measures.

This comprehensive approach must incorporate scientific revelations that may seem unintuitive. For example, consistently extinguishing lower-intensity fires can leave landscapes more vulnerable to more severe events. Similarly, overmanaging and clear-cutting forests actually increase risk by promoting drought conditions. This does not render landscape treatments irrelevant—those treatments must simply support a holistic “systems” approach to governance that connects built and natural environments with wildfire mitigation and prevention.

Under this view, local land-use authority takes on renewed significance. Zoning and enforcement of wildland-urban interface standards may be among Arizona’s most immediate and effective wildfire tools. The statutory authority for more assertive action is largely already in place. The implementation challenge lies less in legal capacity than in commitment and efficient administrative follow-through.

Conclusion

The laws of fire extend well beyond forestry codes. In Arizona, they encompass zoning ordinances, utility regulation, public finance, jurisdictional overlapping, and building standards. Arizona’s wildfire future will not hinge on a single statute or agency. It will depend on whether policymakers commit to a more proactive approach in the governance challenge they face: using scientific principles to extinguish risk long before ignition.