Fire season damage light in area forests

These rains are gently tap-tapping the last nails into the coffin of fire season 2005, which turned out to be one of the most placid on record for the region.

Despite the record-low snowpack and lingering drought, very few acres burned in the Inland Northwest. Only 46 acres were charred out of the total 2.5 million-acre Idaho Panhandle National Forests. Since the late 1960s, an average of about 700 acres of federal forest in North Idaho burns every year, said Forest Service spokesman Dave O’Brien.

“This was a mild, mild, mild year,” he said.

Same is true for the Colville National Forest in northeast Washington, where a measly 15 acres burned. The final numbers contradict the fiery predictions made this spring, on the heels of a record-low snowpack and lingering drought.

“We were supposed to really have it bad this year,” said Ed Wall, assistant manager at the Colville National Forest dispatch center.

Wall and others credit quick work by firefighters, plus well-timed rains and a lack of lightning.

“We had real good initial attack. We just caught them early,” Wall said. “We had three or four that could have been real big.”

The fire season was also quiet on private and state lands in the region. About 5,000 acres burned in 275 separate fires in northeast Washington, which is about 20 percent lower than a typical year, said Steve Harris, with the state’s Department of Natural Resources.

“Mother Nature helped a lot,” he said.

Harris also said there has been more of an emphasis on instituting and enforcing burn bans. About 80 percent of fires are caused by people.

On state and private property managed by the Idaho Department of Lands, there were only 218 fires, which is about half the usual number, said Don Wagner, the agency’s fire planner. Of the 11,195 acres burned, the vast majority were charred by two fires near Grangeville.

Another massive fire west of Grangeville, near Pomeroy, Wash., burned 50,000 acres and 109 residences.

Temperatures in this area were nearly 5 degrees above normal, compared with the Spokane area, where summer temps were just 1.2 degrees higher than usual, Wagner said.

Ironically, the lack of rain in August and July might have helped with the low number of fires, Wagner said. Historically, wildfires in the Inland Northwest were caused by thunderstorms that bring a lot of lightning, but little rain.

“It was too dry for lightning,” Wagner said. “Thunderstorms need moisture to develop. There wasn’t enough moisture for the storms.”

The vast Inland Northwest was once shaped and defined by fire, said O’Brien, with the Forest Service. Researchers have concluded that 13,000 acres would burn on the Panhandle in a typical year. Last year, only 60 acres burned on national forest land in the Panhandle. This year even less burned.

Although the Forest Service has been trying to make up for the gap with prescribed burning, conditions for safe, controlled burns are sometimes rare, O’Brien said. This year, for example, the agency was only able to burn about 2,700 acres. It was either too wet or too dry, O’Brien said.

“This country does grow fuels, and we do have a buildup out there,” O’Brien said.

Nationwide, 8.2 million acres burned this year, which is nearly twice the average for the last decade, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Half of the acres burned in Alaska. The state has been experiencing unusually hot and dry summers.