2006 fire season burns more acreage
BOISE – Federal fire forecasters said Friday the 2006 wildfire season will likely end up scorching about the same amount of land as last year’s fires, although the acreage burned so far this season is well above the 10-year average.
Through August, 7.8 million acres, or more than 12,000 square miles, had burned this year from more than 79,000 fires. In 2005, more than 56,000 fires burned 8.2 million acres, or 12,800 square miles. The 10-year average fire season through August is 4.7 million acres, or 7,300 square miles, from 58,000 fires.
“We’re year-to-date 134 percent of average of the number of fires and 157 percent above on the acreage, but our predictive services folks using computer modeling said today we should have about 8.2 million acres burned by the end of September, pretty much where we were last year,” said Rose Davis, spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise.
The U.S. Department of Interior and the U.S. Forest Service have spent $1.25 billion fighting the fires since the fiscal 2006 year began Oct. 1, but that total includes $40 million in emergency assistance the Forest Service provided for hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office said in a May report the acreage burned by wildfire from 2000 through 2005 was 70 percent higher than the average burned during the 1990s and that the federal government’s cost for wildfire management and suppression tripled from nearly $1 billion in fiscal 1999 to nearly $3 billion in fiscal 2005.
Federal suppression costs have been high this season because of an unusually early and large fire season in Texas and Oklahoma. Federal crews helped battle blazes that burned primarily on private land on the plains and required fleets of bulldozers and skidgeons – water-carrying fire engines on tracks – to control.
Costs have also been steep from a spate of big timber blazes this year in the rugged Rockies, Cascades and Sawtooth mountain ranges.
“We’ve learned when you get fires in that terrain, there’s no reason to put people at risk climbing steep mountainsides,” Davis said. “We incorporate more aviation assets to stem the spread of those fires from the air, which is costlier.”
And sometimes just as dangerous. Three Forest Service firefighters and a pilot died Aug. 14 when their helicopter crashed in Idaho’s Payette National Forest near the South Fork Complex fire.
The new National Wildland Fire Outlook report for September calls for high fire potential in Northern California due to seasonal winds, while monsoons in the Southwestern U.S. have ended the fire season in most of Arizona and New Mexico. The probability of lightning in the Pacific Northwest will drop significantly after Sept. 10, which should lessen the chances of more new fires.
But Tom Wordell, leader of the Predictive Services Unit at the federal firefighting command center in Boise, said “energy release component” measurements of how quickly trees and brush could ignite remain dangerously high after a long, hot summer in the West.
“Most of Oregon, Washington, the southern half of Idaho, Nevada and everything west through California is pretty much near or above historic record norms,” said Wordell. “I mean, it is really dry out there.”