District 4 wildfire plan sets 12-hour mutual aid clock, then cost-share math

If you ranch the rural edge, the part of the wildfire plan that matters is not the nice letterhead, it is the stopwatch and the bill. The District 4 Wildfire Annual Operating Plan packet sets District 4’s default rule for initial attack as reciprocal mutual aid: each agency eats its own costs for up to 12 hours from the first report time, but not past midnight the day the fire is reported. After that, any outside resources still on scene have to be released or turned into ordered, reimbursable resources, and the “protecting agency” (the one responsible for the point of origin) has to be confirmed by the end of that mutual aid period.

When a fire runs multi-jurisdiction, the plan’s default cost-share method is percent of acres burned by ownership, unless the agency administrators document why acreage is misleading and pick a different method. The packet also makes clear how dispatch boundaries work in Teton County (Teton Interagency Dispatch for most starts, Eastern Idaho Dispatch for Caribou-Targhee), and it calls out that the Teton County Search and Rescue helicopter can be requested for fire missions through the county communications center, but it is not covered under the mutual aid provisions.