Smoldering in plain sight: How coal seam mapping is helping mitigate fire risk across the state 

Suzie Netti and her husband, Jay, were luckier than some of their neighbors when the Remington Fire came through Rosebud County last summer. They evacuated most of their animals, including almost all of their cattle. Some of their neighbors lost 75-90% of their herds.

Still, the couple is spending significant amounts of time and money to recover after the blaze. “ I think we’ve figured something like 105 miles of fence to rebuild,” Suzie Netti told Montana Free Press in a phone interview in late August, adding that replacing a single mile of fencing can cost upward of $10,000. 

A year after the fire, they’re just one family working to rebuild from Montana’s largest fire of 2024. But on their ranch, the blaze still simmers. “We have two active spots on our property,” Suzie Netti said. 

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These “spots” are just two of the more than 100 still-burning coal seams the Remington Fire lit last summer. 

Coal seams are a somewhat bizarre natural phenomenon. Lingering underground and in hillsides across the state, the seams are deposits of coal that aren’t valuable enough to mine. These pockets of coal often just sit there for years, lit and quietly burning or waiting to ignite.

Firefighters have known about the consequences of coal seam fires for years. The seams have started major wildfires when weather conditions align — as they did last August. When these fires start, they often do so with little or no warning, igniting when dry, windy conditions find a smoldering seam.

There are several burning coal seams that reliably cause a fire every year, according to Cory Cheguis, an emergency manager, firefighter and rancher in Custer County who has been mapping coal seams across the state since 2022.

Cheguis and the coal seam mapping group CM Thermal and Fire, LLC, have mapped 107 burning coal seams from the Remington Fire alone. The company’s mapping database includes an ever-growing list of coal seams. So far this year, they’ve added 350 to the database. 

Cheguis and his team have been mapping coal seams primarily in eastern Montana, but they’re working to expand their efforts and hope to start extinguishing particularly problematic seams. 

“The idea is [we’ll] map out everything that we have in eastern Montana, and then we’ll figure out the attributes and make a priority list based on access, topography, infrastructure and what’s close by to see which seams might … be trouble,” Cheguis told MTFP in July. The process of extinguishing a coal seam requires removing it from the surrounding area entirely, which can cost $10,000 for small seams and up to $100,000 for larger ones. 

Cheguis said that some private land owners pay to have their coal seams removed, but others are deterred by the cost. Instead, property owners like the Nettises may let the coal seams quietly simmer on their property. 

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Beyond the threat of wildfires, coal seams can also lead to spontaneous land subsidence. When a fire consumes the coal fueling it, land above can collapse, jeopardizing homes, utility infrastructure and agricultural land. 

The compounding threats of coal seams led Cheguis and his team to apply for a grant administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in cooperation with state agencies.

CM Thermal and Fire was approved to receive $324,000 of funding geared toward reducing the emissions of climate-warming greenhouse gases, money that was included in the Inflation Reduction Act. (In the application that the Montana Department of Environmental Quality submitted to the EPA, the state estimated that mitigating and extinguishing coal seam fires could bring down Montana’s carbon dioxide emissions by 20 million tons by 2050.)

But that $324,000 hasn’t materialized as promised since Donald Trump re-entered the White House earlier this year and subsequently reversed many of the climate initiatives his predecessor implemented. Funding for mapping and mitigating coal seams has been frozen, like many projects related to climate change.

MTFP reached out to Gov. Greg Gianforte’s office and other state officials for information on the status of the $50 million that was set to flow to the state through the Climate Pollution Reduction program. State staffers didn’t return MTFP’s emails or calls, though information in the state’s database for contracting bids indicates the grant has been canceled. 

For its part, an EPA spokesperson insisted in an Aug. 5 email to MTFP that a $49,769,891 implementation grant under the Climate Pollution Reduction Implementation Grant Program is “fully funded and the [Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation] has begun work on the project.” 

Cheguis said he hasn’t seen any of the funding promised to him. Regardless, CM Thermal and Fire’s mapping work is ongoing. Cheguis said he’s hopeful that the funding will eventually reach his company.  

“This is wildfire mitigation work,” Cheguis said. “It’s all about wildfires.”