News – Sheridan Media
This coming Saturday (September 27th) marks one year of the discovery of the Elk Fire, and today, one year later, work is on-going to assess, repair and clean up the damage.
The lightning-caused blaze burned more than 98-thousand acres of land, mostly on the eastern face of the Bighorn Mountains, and in the Bighorn National Forest.
Since that time the Sheridan County Conservation District has been working on its share of cleanup and assessing the damage.
Tasks include additional water testing, debris and sediment removal, cleaning out various reservoirs and repairing irrigation infrastructure.
District Manager Carrie Rogaczewski says while fire recovery and prevention work may not be something that this district is used to, the name of the game for a conversation district is to take emerging issues and have the flexibility to address those as they come up.
“When new projects come up, like fire stuff, we are positioned in a way that we can kind of do a little bit of a pivot and pull together what we can. We have experience managing grants, we have relationships with some of those granting entities. We had the infrastructure, the administration capacity already kind of set up so we could hit the ground running.”
Rogaczewski adds the District received about $160-thousand for fire mitigation work, about $58-thousand for watershed assessment work, and about $50-thousand for additional water quality monitoring.
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Last modified: September 25, 2025