Interior secretary says Dragon Bravo Fire contributed to deadly Grand Canyon flooding

U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said Monday that misguided forest management policies played a role in the recent deadly flash floods at the Grand Canyon.

Burgum told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s The Mike Broomhead Show that a failure to properly manage protected forest areas contributed to the potency of last year’s Dragon Bravo Fire on the North Rim, which in turn increased the risk of flash flooding on the canyon’s floor.

“When the forest has been burned through, you get a lot of runoff, a lot of mud that occurs,” Burgum said. “So, [if] you talk to anybody in the forestry business, and a year after, two years after a major fire, flash flooding is a concern that those professional foresters and that we have had going into this.”

The Dragon Bravo Fire burned nearly 150,000 acres of Grand Canyon National Park and Kaibab National Forest land last summer.

Postfire assessment noted potential for increased runoff at Grand Canyon

A Department of the Interior Burned Area Emergency Response Team conducted a postfire assessment in August 2025. The assessment found that the burn scar would increase the water runoff and debris flow in Bright Angel Creek, but “they are unlikely to significantly impact values-at-risk under normal storm conditions.”

Burgum, however, said the Dragon Bravo Fire and Saturday’s Bright Angel Creek flooding are connected. At least two people were killed in the flooding and about a dozen were still missing as of Monday morning.

“From that North Rim down to the bottom, it’s a 6,000-foot differential. This is mountainous territory with narrow canyons. A little bit of rain building up steam — as you’ve heard from eyewitness reports, a 15-foot wall of water coming through the campground … — that’s a treacherous thing,” he said.

He said attitudes about protecting wilderness areas need to change.

“We started about 30 years ago where as a country we just said, ‘Wow, the way we’re going to protect our forests is never set foot in them; turn them all into wilderness areas; nobody can take a chainsaw in; we’re going to crush anybody that’s in the timber industry, including the mill towns and the local communities,'” he said.

Burgum said keeping the timber industry out of protected forests has been bad for fire safety due to the increased fuel loads and bad for the economy.

“We’ve managed to make our forests more dangerous and we’ve made lumber more expensive and housing more expensive in our country. Just with common sense, we’ve got to get back and get ahead of this thing, and it starts with reducing that fuel load,” he said.

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