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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Fire Worry Shifts To Range Land Large Forest Blazes Less Likely This Year

Associated Press

Weather has always dictated Idaho’s fire season, and 1995 will be no different. But conditions that are easing concerns in the high country are raising them in the lower elevations.

Last winter’s normal conditions mean the state may avoid the kind of colossal forest fires that vaporized hundreds of thousands of acres in the central mountains a year ago.

But on the range, verdant green cheatgrass is up to a firefighter’s belt buckle and starting to cure. Dry lightning storms could ignite tens of thousands of acres under control of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management this summer.

“My crystal ball tells me we probably won’t have a severe forest fire season, but the lower elevations are a coin toss,” said Bob Clark, Idaho’s BLM fire management officer. “If we have lots of lightning, we’ll have lots of fires.”

Clark has been watching the moisture level of the “1,000-hour fuels” - the large trees - on the Idaho forests. It takes that many hours or more of dry weather to rob them of their moisture and a like amount of precipitation to replace it.

The 1,000-hour fuel moisture is up considerably to as much as 15 percent. That’s twice what it was a year ago, when kiln-dried lumber had more moisture than Idaho’s forests. But the level should be about 24 percent, Clark said, and it could take two or three years of average winters to reach that mark.

“We still have a lot of snow in the higher mountains,” he said. “What that is going to do is delay fire season in the mountains, probably until August. So what you’ve done is shortened the time the forest will be susceptible to wildfire.”

The snowpack is still above average on the Payette National Forest, where 270,000 acres burned last year. But as in other parts of the state, that snow has only begun to offset the effects of a decade of drought.

“I think it might surprise folks that we could have some of the larger project fires,” Payette fire staff officer Gene Benedict said. “With average precipitation and average lightning, August and early September could be interesting.”

And while southern Idaho had good winter precipitation, the normally wetter forests north of the Salmon River got only about 75 percent of their average snowpack, so the stage could be set for extensive wildfires there.

The wet spring also caused a rich growth of grass on the range, and if a parade of thunderheads this summer replaces the lack of lightning activity of last year, the potential is there for a fiery summer across southern Idaho and northern Nevada.

“We have cheatgrass where I didn’t know cheatgrass would grow,” Clark said.

Fire weather meteorologist Paul Worth of the National Weather Service said there is no way to predict lightning storms.

About 740,000 acres burned in Idaho last year, nearly a fifth of the national total of 4 million acres. At times more than 20,000 people were committed to fighting fires throughout the West in a year that far exceeded the recent average of 3.1 million acres lost to flames.

Spokesman Mike Apicello at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise said fires are already being fought in the East and Southwest. Crews are also on the lines in the Northwest, mobilized against a blaze along the Bull River on Montana’s Kootenai National Forest and another in northwestern Washington.

But overall the level of activity is down from a year ago.

“We’re off to a slower start than last year and not as intense,” Apicello said.