Fire season off to a slow start in north Rockies

BILLINGS – Fire season 2004 in the Northern Rockies is off to an unexpectedly slow start.

Latest figures show 19,935 acres have burned this summer in an area that includes all of Montana, North Dakota, Yellowstone National Park, northern Idaho and a small area of northwestern South Dakota.

“We’re still as dry as ever, but it’s just that the storm patterns are a little different this year,” said Paul Mock, fire management officer for Custer National Forest.

In the same area during 2003, forest fires burned on 883,263 acres. It was the most disastrous season since 2000, when 4,371 fires scorched nearly 1.4 million acres.

“The fuels are really dry, but we haven’t seen a lot of lightning, and what (storms) we have had has had moisture with it,” said Paul Mullaney, fire specialist for the Bureau of Land Management.

“We’re kind of shaking our heads a little bit,” Mullaney said. “All the indices we go by are pretty darn high.”

In the eastern Montana portion of the region, slightly more than 8,000 acres have burned, with some of the largest fires in April before the rains started to fall.

“If the amount of precipitation slows down, it wouldn’t take long for (fuels) to dry out,” said Todd Chambers, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Billings. “We could have a real dangerous situation.”

Mullaney said people are “stacked up” to attack wildfires quickly.

“We’re prepared. We’re jumping in with everything we’ve got on every fire start.” Hopefully, we won’t have a fire season.”

He said the most vulnerable areas of southeastern Montana are the Northern Cheyenne Reservation and the rough timber country around Ashland.

Mock said he is keeping his fingers crossed the situation won’t deteriorate.