Headline illogic
All irony aside, the headline should probably have addressed what the real story was: that the BLM has started to emphasize energy development in the Upper Colorado Unit wildland fire safety plan. A good title would have been: “BLM emphasizes oil & gas development in fire safety plan.” But even with that, you only gave us part of the story - your article begs the unasked questions, “why now? why not before?” We needed more information than you gave us to answer those questions. It would have been nice if you’d given us more than one data point (one gas well burned last summer when a fire passed through gas fields) and more information on that one data point (how many gas fields and how many wells in each gas field were exposed to the fire) so we could have gotten a sense of how often gas well fires are likely to occur. To help readers get a better sense of the hazard, you could have included a discussion of how much added danger the fire at that single gas well added to the Red Apple fire. You could have addressed the hazards of cutting fire lines in a gas field compared with cutting fire lines within forested residential developments that have buried pipelines. You might also have discussed how risk is a combination of the likelihood of a problem (frequency) weighted with its potential impact (hazard). It also would have been good to identify whether or not the BLM had previously addressed energy development would have. These things could have helped us understand why BLM hasn’t emphasized energy development in its fire safety plan until now, and allow us to make informed judgments about whether or not the BLM action is appropriate now and/or should have been done before.
So why did you choose the headline you did?
This letter has not been edited.