January 8, 2026, 01:55 MST
- Utah released an updated statewide wildfire risk map and urged communities to treat it as a planning tool.
- Utah’s high-risk wildland-urban interface boundary, tied to House Bill 48, will shape fees and insurance rules starting this year.
- Central Texas is updating a 2026 wildfire tracker as state crews handle early calls.
Utah officials on Thursday released an updated statewide wildfire risk map that shows much of southern Utah, including large portions of Kane County and surrounding public lands, in the higher-risk categories because of dense fuels, steep terrain and seasonal winds. The map is intended to guide planning and mitigation as the state heads into another fire season shaped by drought, growth and changing climate conditions.
Risk maps like this are becoming a go-to tool for fire agencies and local governments as more housing spreads into the wildland-urban interface, the zone where neighborhoods meet flammable brush and forest.
The push comes with money on the line. Officials are trying to steer zoning, building rules and fuel work before the next dry, windy stretch turns a small start into an evacuation.
Utah’s updated map was built with federal land agencies, local fire districts and land-use planners and folds in updated vegetation data, topography and historical fire behavior. It ranks areas from lower to very high risk based on the chance of fire and the likely intensity and impact if one breaks out.
A separate High-Risk WUI boundary released in December puts about 60,000 structures in Utah’s top risk tier and triggers a new annual fee on property owners, while insurers must use the state boundary beginning Jan. 1, officials said. “It’s only those at the ninety-fifth percentile,” Joseph Anderson, Utah DNR’s wildfire risk reduction program manager, said. Deputy state fire management officer Taiga Rohrer said fees “range somewhere from $20 to $100 a structure” in 2026 and 2027, while Unified Fire Authority spokesperson Kelly Bird urged residents to weigh slopes, wind and fuel around their homes. FOX 13 News Utah (KSTU)
State Forester Jamie Barnes has framed the work as a targeted response to rising insurance pressure, rather than a statewide alarm. “It’s not the entire state that is painted red,” Barnes said. KPCW
In Central Texas, KXAN’s wildfire tracker said about 2.5 acres have burned so far in 2026, citing the Texas A&M Forest Service. The agency’s daily status report put the state’s wildfire preparedness level at 2 on a 1-to-5 scale and said it received four requests for assistance on fires totaling 10 acres on Wednesday.
Texas A&M Forest Service said last year it responded to 5,115 wildfires that affected 123,186 acres statewide, according to a station report from ABC7 Amarillo. The agency also reported deploying 526 personnel and using 136 aircraft that dropped about 760,946 gallons of water and retardant.
The map-making is not just local. The National Interagency Fire Center points the public to federal mapping tools that show current fire perimeters, near-real-time satellite detections and historical burn areas, while the AirNow Fire and Smoke Map tracks fine particle pollution from smoke.
