A federal trial is scheduled to begin Dec. 2 in a lawsuit alleging two Montana ranches were damaged by fires ignited by the U.S. government.

The eight-day bench trial is set to take place at the federal courthouse in Missoula, Mont., before Chief Judge Elaine Kaplan of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

The McDonough and Ingersoll family ranches near Wolf Creek, Mont., claim they lost $8.8 million in forage, timber and other property from the U.S. Forest Service’s “backfiring and burnout operations” during a 2017 wildfire in Montana’s 1.9 million-acre Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest.

The ranches originally filed their unlawful government takings complaint four years ago, alleging the agency intentionally burned vegetation to alter the wildfire’s course and achieve “resource management objectives” instead of limiting itself to safer firefighting strategies.

Earlier this year, the judge rejected the U.S. government’s request to dismiss the case “as a matter of law” because the ranch properties would have burned regardless of the “firing operations,” which also came under the Montana state government’s jurisdiction.

The judge ruled the exact roles of state and federal agencies and other fact-specific questions can’t be resolved “only on a paper record” and would need to be determined based on the evidence at trial.

In a recent trial memorandum, the federal government said the ranches have chosen to “second guess” the actions of local, state and federal firefighters who “successfully reduced the damage” from the Alice Creek Fire.

“The firefighters’ actions successfully reduced the spread of the fire, and the court should reject plaintiffs’ flawed after-the-fact critiques, which are not supported by the evidence,” the government said.

Firefighters had to respond to an imminent emergency because the wildfire was spreading rapidly and had to be contained, the government said.

The plaintiffs cannot prove that government inaction would’ve prevented damage to their property, the government said. Even if they could “establish causation,” the government is shielded by the “necessity doctrine” because it was reacting to an emergency.

“Heroic suppression efforts by firefighters, including the construction of firelines and use of helicopters to drop water on the fire, successfully and substantially limited the spread of the fire that would have occurred had no fire suppression efforts occurred,” the government said. “Without those actions, Plaintiffs’ property would have burned to a much greater extent.”

In their trial memorandum, the ranches contend the government relies on “hypothetical layered upon hypothetical” in claiming their forage and timber would have burned regardless of the backfiring operations.

“It is impossible to do more than speculate on what would have happened with the Alice Creek Fire had the government used all of the tactics it actually employed but refrained only from backfiring operations,” the plaintiffs said.

Igniting the backfires was the “causal event” due to which the property was “converted from ranch ownership to government ownership,” the memorandum said.

“Furthermore, if the United States government had simply left the Alice Creek Fire unattended, state firefighters would have ‘aggressively and rapidly’ suppressed it, as they are required to do by statute,” the document said.

The ranches discount the necessity defense, arguing the backfiring operations responded to a “government-created emergency” because the agency had left the wildfire “unstaffed and uncontained” earlier in the summer.

“These fire management decisions caused or at least allowed the fire to leave the national forest and enter onto private and state lands, including property owned by the ranches,” the memorandum said.