Sen. Mitt Romney on Thursday cited a harrowing 2021 blaze in the Park City area during a hearing centered on the federal government’s wildfire policies, describing that people who were impacted by the Parleys Canyon Fire were displeased with the situation.

The Republican’s comments about the Parleys Canyon Fire represented just a small segment of the hearing, but they were especially notable in the community where the fire occurred. The blaze charred 541 acres climbing up from Interstate 80 toward the border between Summit County and Salt Lake County. It led to the evacuations of neighborhoods in parts of the Snyderville Basin in one of the most dramatic wildfires in the Park City area in decades. Romney toured the fire zone shortly afterward.

“In 2021, the Parleys Canyon Fire forced the evacuation of 8,000 residents along the Wasatch Front for an extended period of time. And I went and met with people there and they were angry, asking why couldn’t we do a better job preventing these things from happening? And I didn’t have a lot of answers, and we were actually even considering closing down Interstate 80 as a result of that fire,” Romney said in his opening statement on Thursday.

The initial report of what would become the Parleys Canyon Fire in the middle of August involved a brush fire that was described as small at that moment. The Park City Fire District responded, but it was clear early on in the efforts the blaze would prove difficult. The Fire District and an agency from the Salt Lake Valley responded quickly, but air resources were summoned to assist. The firefighting operation coupled with precipitation stopped the spread, and the blaze was essentially contained after six days.

Romney visited the land in late August, in the days after the fire was extinguished. Representatives of Park City-area emergency services, including the Summit County sheriff at the time, Justin Martinez, and Fire District Chief Bob Zanetti accompanied the senator on the visit.

The senator in an interview at the time said the success in the firefighting was a result of all the efforts coming together, including the work that had been undertaken over time in preparation for a fire like the one in 2021. Romney in the interview also talked about the availability of firefighting aircraft shortly after the fire started as being a key to the firefighting effort.

The senator on Thursday addressed the possibilities of the federal role in firefighting.  

“It is a national priority. I recognize that we can’t keep on doing the way we have in the past. We’re going to have to have some changes. It’s going to require additional funding. We may need additional fixed wing aircraft, different monitoring systems, different remediation, different forestry management, different prescribed burns processes. There are a lot of things that we are going to have to do differently than we have in the past,” he said.

The prospects of a large wildfire have long been of concern in the Park City area. A blaze like that could have devastating impacts on the tourism industry in addition to the possibility of loss of life and structures. A risk assessment was crafted for Park City in 2023 covering numerous issues related to the danger.