Idaho fire conditions worst since 1926

BOISE - Fire conditions in Idaho are the worst they’ve been since 1926, the state forester reports, and things are only looking to get worse. In the past week, the state’s estimate of its firefighting costs for the season has jumped by $10 million to roughly $25 million, said state Forester David Groeschl, and the number of major fires requiring incident management teams on lands that Idaho Department of Lands protects has jumped from four to 12. “We have a lot of fire season ahead of us, and those numbers will continue to change quickly,” he said. Groeschl briefed the state’s top elected officials on the Idaho Land Board on the situation on Tuesday, days after dozens of homes burned in a raging wildfire near Kamiah in north-central Idaho. For 2015, Groeschl said, “We are now at 119 percent of 20-year average for fire starts.” A week ago, 2,400 acres had burned on state protection; now it’s 89,000 acres. “That represents 800 percent of the 20-year average.” He said, “When we look back at records, looking back at weather condition records and trying to find a year that is similar to this, we had to go back to 1926. … This is an unprecedented fire season that we’re seeing both in dryness, the lack of precipitation, we are seeing well above-average temperatures, and we’re seeing fuel moisture levels that are at record lows. .. We are seeing some unprecedented sort of conditions.” Looking ahead, he said, “We have really no moisture in the forecast for the next 10 to 14 days. … We have a lot of fire season ahead of us.” The Kamiah-area fire, now dubbed the Clearwater Complex and taking in several big blazes in the region, was about 25 percent contained as of Tuesday. “Friday was a very rough day last week for the citizens of Kamiah,” Groeschl said. “We had winds in the neighborhood of 35 mph that blew the fire up, and we lost approximately 45 homes, primary structures, and 75 secondary structures. So the citizens of Kamiah were very impacted and continue to be impacted by this fire.” The Clearwater Complex fire now looks likely to surpass the Cape Horn Fire near Bayview in early July as the costliest and most destructive on state-protected lands this year. “The team is making good progress on that fire,” Groeschl said, with more than 800 people working on it. “Resources are stretched thin nationally.” Idaho Gov. Butch Otter, who chairs the Land Board and visited the Kamiah area on Saturday, said, it’s burning in difficult, mountainous terrain. “There’s some parts of that fire you just can’t fight – it’s just too steep, just too overgrown,” he said. The current cost estimate for the Clearwater Complex fires is $7.5 million, but that’s likely to change. The Idaho Department of Lands is responsible for fire protection on 6.3 million acres of mostly state and private land in the state.