While Wyoming has remained relatively quiet on the coal seam fire front so far this summer, the same can’t be said for just across the border in Montana. There, temperatures are soaring past 100 degrees, and vegetation is drying into tinder, creating the perfect environment for smoldering underground coal to become raging wildfires.
The Remington Fire, which started in Wyoming last summer and became Montana’s largest wildfire of 2024 at 196,000 acres, has left a combustible legacy. Powder River County Assistant Fire Chief Clint Pedersen used a thermal imaging drone last month to survey the burn scar and identified 107 new burning coal seams.
Those underground fires now sit like unattended campfires waiting for the right wind to ignite new wildfires. “We had one here the other day,” Pedersen said of a recent 5-acre fire that sparked from a coal seam on Bureau of Land Management land. “It was on a coal seam that we knew about. Rough Red Shale, I think I called it.”
There also are dozens of underground seams of coal in northeast Wyoming, which can smolder for years before something kicks them up to the surface. After hundreds of thousands of acres burned during last year’s wildfire season in the region, state and local wildfire officials have said many more may have been started.
Pedersen, who flies a drone equipped with a $25,000 thermal imaging camera, explained how shifting wind patterns can turn dormant coal seams into active threats. “When we get a wind shift for a few days, you know, like it’s been out of the west for quite a while, and then we get east wind or something, I think the vent holes become the exhaust hole,” he said. “They switch directions and it’s just glowing over the top of those intake holes now where they become exhaust holes. I think that that kind of flares them up.”
