FIRE Act

What this does

This bill amends Section 319(b) of the Clean Air Act to let states discount air pollution caused by wildfire-prevention burns. It creates a new category, "action to mitigate wildfire risk," defined as a prescribed fire or similar measure carried out under state-approved practices to reduce wildfire risk and severity. Under current law a state may petition EPA to exclude monitoring data from an "exceptional event" when EPA decides whether an area meets national air quality standards. This bill extends that same petition process to pollution from wildfire-mitigation actions, so exceedances traced to a prescribed burn can be excluded from attainment and designation determinations. It directs EPA to issue revised regulations within 18 months of enactment. It requires EPA to run regional modeling when more than one state petitions over the same multistate air quality event. It requires EPA to build a public website, updated monthly, tracking the status of all petitions. It also rewrites the definition of "exceptional event" and states that the term does not include ordinary air-mass stagnation, meteorological inversions, or pollution from source noncompliance.