Weather likely to give fire crews a break

A big chill is expected to bring a big break for wildland firefighters.

But those battling a massive central Washington blaze may first have to cope with winds of 40 mph that are predicted to accompany the weather front tonight. They worked Friday to expand fire lines in Chelan County, where the occupants of more than 300 homes remained under a mandatory evacuation order.

“The worst could still be ahead,” said Bob Anderson, commander of the effort to extinguish the 16,000-acre Fischer fire.

In North Idaho and Eastern Washington, no large fires are burning but more than 75 small ones have been ignited by lightning strikes this week. Only a handful have grown larger than an acre and none has threatened any structures, according to dispatchers in both states.

The relatively quiet wildfire season in North Idaho and Eastern Washington comes despite extremely dry conditions in most forests and fields. Thanks is owed to the quick action of firefighters, said Steve Rawlings, assistant fire management officer for the Colville National Forest. Airborne spotters, smokejumpers and ground crews have been working nonstop to snuff fires soon after they start.

“We’re using everything available to us,” Rawlings said. “It seems to be going pretty well.”

Wednesday’s and Thursday’s storms put down at least 3,000 lightning strikes in northeast Washington, Rawlings said. The Colville National Forest has kept an aerial observation team flying over the region nearly nonstop during daylight hours.

“We’ve been flying them as much as we can,” Rawlings said. “Without them, things would be different.”

The biggest of the fires, at 15 acres, burned in the Little Pend Oreille National Wildlife Refuge, about 13 miles southeast of Colville. In North Idaho, the largest fire has been a 2-acre blaze Friday near Harrison, according to a spokesman at the Coeur d’Alene Interagency Dispatch Center. About 25 small fires have been reported in North Idaho since the beginning of the week.

“There’s been no problems,” the dispatcher said. “Just the regular smoke-chaser fires.”

This stands in sharp contrast to central Washington, where the Fischer fire is among a series of massive fires that have been burning for more than a month. Nearly 70,000 acres have burned in recent weeks near Lake Chelan and Leavenworth. A new fire north of Omak ignited Tuesday and has burned more than 600 acres.

National Weather Service forecaster John Fox said a major change is expected, with unseasonably cool weather and rain. High temperatures are predicted to top out in the low 70s on Sunday, he said. The rest of the week is expected to be cool and wet.

Changing weather always brings the risk of additional lightning activity, Fox said, but enough rain should accompany the storms to keep new fire action low.