West enjoying respite from wildfires

DENVER — Except for Alaska, unusually mild weather has made this summer one of the quietest wildfire seasons in the West in years.

From the Pacific to the Great Plains, well-timed rains, cooler temperatures and an uncommonly low number of dry thunderstorms have dampened the fire danger.

The total area burned by wildfires in the United States this year — almost 7.7 million acres, or about 12,000 square miles — is the second largest in almost half a century, behind 2000’s 8.4 million acres scorched. But 83 percent of that was in Alaska, where huge backcountry fires can burn for weeks without threat to people or property.

After several summers of severe drought and widespread smoke and flames, fire specialists expected more large tracts of forest and grasslands in the contiguous Western states to burn this year. Instead, wildfires here have been fewer and smaller. Credit the weather, say fire weather experts.

Lightning strikes normally start more than 70 percent of the West’s wildfires. But this year, “whenever we had lightning, we had it with rain,” says Rick Ochoa, fire weather program manager at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise.

Only one Western blaze outside of Alaska this summer has been bigger than 100,000 acres, a standard benchmark for mega-fires that have beset the region in most of the past five summers.

Wildfire season in the West ranges from spring in the desert Southwest to fall and early winter in Southern California.

In Oregon, where the 500,000-acre Biscuit fire was the nation’s worst in 2002, there were few major burns this year. So, too, in Colorado, where the 2002 Hayman fire torched 138,000 acres and 132 homes. As of August, just 17,000 acres had burned here.

In the Southwest, a rather wet spring meant grasses, dead timber and other wildfire “fuel” took longer to dry out. Then came the midsummer monsoons, an annual wave of afternoon thunderstorms that cut the wildfire season short in Arizona and New Mexico.

In the Pacific Northwest, it has been so mild and moist, Ochoa says, “that I would say the season is pretty much over” for Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana.

In Wyoming, where the 1988 fires of Yellowstone National Park consumed nearly 2,500 square miles of forest, the largest wildfire this summer was less than 8 square miles. Utah is having its quietest fire year since 1997.

But in Alaska, a heat wave and an unusual lack of rain has helped break a half-century-old record for most acres burned in a state in one year. More than 650 wildfires have charred almost 6.4 million acres in Alaska. That’s 10,000 square miles, or an area nearly the size of Massachusetts. The previous record of 5 million acres was set in 1957.