Western States Enjoy Weak Fire Season Region Isn’t Out Of The Woods Yet, But Fires Are Down About 40 Percent

With the wildfire season coming to a close, Forest Service smokejumpers are still waiting for fires to fight. They’ve been waiting all summer, all over the West.

“We had a three-day fire season,” said Randy Doman, deputy chief of the fire staff at the Nez Perce National Forest in Grangeville in central Idaho.

During that brief time in late August, his crew of about 25 smokejumpers battled 77 fires on the Clearwater National Forest and 65 others on the Nez Perce.

Across the West, the lightning storms that usually trigger huge numbers of forest fires have been accompanied by rain this year.

Also, much of the region had a wet spring, leaving soil and vegetation with plenty of moisture.

The result: almost a 40 percent drop in the number of wildfires reported compared with last year.

Still, the West isn’t out of danger yet.

“We do have a lot of potential for fire, especially in California,” said Rick Ochoa, a National Weather Service meteorologist at the federal government’s firefighting center in Boise.

On Friday, there were 34 fires burning in Western states on state lands and 28 on Forest Service land.

The 18 fires burning in northern California were by far the largest concentration, but there were no large fires.

Experts are tracking lightning storms closely. There can be 60,000 to 70,000 strikes on a “good, heavy, active day,” Ochoa said.

Most don’t result in fires. When accompanied by rain, few do.

“We haven’t had the dry lightning outbreaks that we have had from time to time,” he said.

Nationally, it has been an average fire year, with fewer fires reported than the 10-year average, but a little more acreage burned than the average.

Lorraine Buck, assistant chief for external affairs at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, said 49,801 fires have been reported to the center, compared with a 10-year average of 60,095.

About 2.7 million acres of federal land have been involved in fires, just more than the 10-year average.

For all of last year, 79,107 fires were reported, covering just over 4 million acres.

“We are not going to get to that point this year,” Buck said. “The fire season is sort of winding down. We would need a radical shift in weather predictions.”

Alaska by far has the most land covered by fire this year. It had fires on 833,991 acres of Bureau of Land Management land, 761,000 on Forest Service land, just under 300,000 on state land and a total of 1.9 million acres.

In Idaho, the state treasury might benefit from the small number of fires. It can be expensive to protect the state’s 2.6 million acres of land. Three years ago, the bill was more than $7 million.

So far this year, the state has spent about $475,000 on 214 fires covering just 744 acres, said Winston Wiggins, assistant director of the Department of Lands.

“It is becoming more and more unlikely that we will have anything that is particularly bad this season,” Wiggins said.