Wildfire season could be catastrophic

Drought, heat, premature snowmelt listed in forecast

By Patrick O'Driscoll
USA Today

Published: Monday, April 5 2004 7:18 a.m. MDT

Anthony Spotted Wolf pauses Sunday while digging a fire line near Laporte, Colo., in an early season wildfire.

RJ Sangosti, Associated Press

Summary

Much of the West faces the danger of major wildfires this year, climate and fire specialists forecast. Potential hot spots include areas of Southern California hit by catastrophic fires last fall.

DENVER — Much of the West faces the danger of major wildfires this year, climate and fire specialists forecast. Potential hot spots include areas of Southern California hit by catastrophic fires last fall.

The threat of major fires could rival the summers of 2000 and 2002, the worst wildfire seasons of the past half-century, teams of federal scientists and land managers predicted last week in a wildfire forecast for 2004.

Fire losses in those two years spurred Congress to fund projects to thin forests by logging and controlled burning. But those efforts, which are steeped in controversy, are in the early stages and will take years to complete.

The teams base their dire forecast on several factors:

Years of chronic drought have killed millions of trees and made millions more vulnerable to insect infestation. The result is tinder-dry fuel ready to burn.

Weather forecasts predict a summer that will be warmer and drier than normal in much of the region.

Record-high temperatures last month prematurely melted much of the mountain snow in the West. Substantial amounts of the early snowmelt evaporated or soaked into the ground rather than slowly feed vegetation and fill reservoirs.

"I wish we had more good to say, but there really isn't," says one of the forecast's authors, Rick Ochoa of the federal Bureau of Land Management. Fire danger "is going to rapidly escalate in just a few weeks."

Potential trouble spots include most of the Southwest (Arizona, New Mexico, southern Utah and parts of Colorado) and part of the Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies (eastern Washington and Oregon, central and northern Idaho and western Montana). Much of the rest of the region also is at risk if the dry spring weather continues.

Fires that burned last week and this week in Colorado and Arizona were early evidence of the danger. More than 9,000 acres burned in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains about 70 miles northwest of here. In Arizona, two fires northeast and southwest of Phoenix charred a combined 10,000 acres. All three blazes were believed to have been caused by people.

"Any springtime precipitation might delay the (fire) season, but it won't stop it," says climate and fire researcher Tim Brown of the University of Nevada's Desert Research Institute in Reno.

The outlook may force firefighting agencies to deploy crews and resources weeks earlier than usual. Normally, they are at full strength by late May or early June. About 18,000 firefighters were on duty at the peak of fire season last year, when more than 63,300 fires burned nearly 4 million acres.

"We're thinking prevention," says Justin Dombrowski, wildland fire manager for Boulder County, Colo., where many families live near dry forests.

Dombrowski urges people living on the edge of forests to clear trees and brush near their homes and prepare evacuation plans. "They can't wait until they see a wall of fire in June or July in their back yard to do something."

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