State Prescribed Burn Statutes

Laws and regulations on the use of prescribed fire in the southeastern United States have changed substantially over the past two decades.  In response to concerns about the potential civil liability for prescribed burners, Florida passed the Prescribed Burning Act of 1990 that explicitly supports the safe use of prescribed fire as a beneficial activity for vegetation management. It contains liability protection measures for certified prescribed burn managers that satisfy a number of requirements for any given burn (Brenner and Wade 1992, 2003).  Many southeastern states have since followed Florida’s example and have adopted similar statutes.  The general trend since the 1990s in prescribed fire statutory law in this region has been toward increased regulatory requirements for prescribed burning and less liability risk for burners for damage from fire and for nuisance claims relating to smoke from prescribed fires.

This article provides brief summaries of current statutory law pertaining to prescribed fires in the southeastern states.  The statutory laws can be sorted into a number of categories (Table:Categories of liability law and their related statutes).  Statutes with references to prescribed fire or related terms were identified via keyword searches using the Lexis-Nexis legal database.  This set of summaries is narrow in a number of ways.  First, neither the summaries nor the statutes themselves (to which the summaries are linked) necessarily cover all or any related state case law pertaining to prescribed fire;  American Law Reports (1994) provides a summary of case law relating to prescribed fire.  Second, prescribed burns are often subject to nuisance law that pertains to a broad range of public nuisance rather than prescribed fire specifically, and this nuisance perspective is not reflected here except where explicit in relevant statutes.  Third, the statutes generally do not cover legal issues relating to liability for smoke, which is often addressed under nuisance law.  See Battye and others (1999) for summaries of smoke management programs for western and southern states.  Finally, statutory law does not contain details about the regulatory and administrative process.  See Haines and Cleaves (1999) for further discussion of the regulatory and voluntary programs for prescribed fire in southern states. Because statutes are subject to court interpretation, an attorney licensed to practice in the particular state should be consulted for specific legal advice.

Alabama	Oklahoma
Arkansas	Puerto Rico
Florida	South Carolina
Georgia	Tennessee
Kentucky	Texas
Louisiana	Virgin Islands
Mississippi	Virginia
North Carolina