Tallying Up the 2007 Fire Season

An extended fire season exacerbated by severe drought made for higher burn totals than normal this summer, according to National Forest officials who are in the midst of tallying up figures for the 2007 season.

For the Lolo and Bitterroot National Forests, while the number of fires caused by humans and lightning did not increase dramatically, the number of acres that burned did. In some cases, though, officials let the fires burn as part of fuel reduction programs.

In Lolo National Forest, 200 fires burned over 139,000 acres this past summer. Over the previous 10 years, the forest had experienced an average of 179 fires and 16,139 total acres burned. This summer 74 fires were caused by humans, as compared to an average of 63 over the previous 10 years.

Bitterroot National Forest officials reported 109 fires this season, down from an average of 146. However the 41,744 acres burned in the Bitterroot this season is higher than the annual average of 27,714, according to Rick Floch, timber coordinator for the forest. Floch said that officials blame 11 of this year’s fires on human activity, down from an average of 22.

“As bad as it seemed, it was probably an average season,” Floch said. “It was a standout in terms of lingering smoke in the Bitterroot Valley, mostly due to smoke from fires in Idaho blowing over here.”

In both Lolo and Bitterroot forests, officials said the fire season arrived three weeks earlier than normal due to faster snow melts and was fueled by a record drought in July and August. “It was a longer, prolonged fire season, made a bit more demanding by the drought,” Lolo National Forest spokesman Boyd Hartwig said. “The condition of the fuels when they’re that dry can make the fires harder to catch.”

Floch said record dry levels lasted from the beginning of July through mid-September. “We had the early snow melt and then the rain basically stopped on June 12,” he said. While green vegetation in the forests held back the fires for a time, once moisture levels dropped, the fires began in earnest.

In addition to being highly resistant to both ground and air suppression, firefighters in Lolo National Forest reported strange fire behavior in the drought conditions this summer. This included fires burning into the wind and reports that deciduous trees like alder were torching.

“It was a long and sometimes trying fire season,” Lolo fire management officer Chuck Stanich said in a statement. The statement stated that fire managers and firefighters reported conditions that many had not seen before in their careers.

Pat Cross, a fire information officer on the Jocko Lakes fire near Seeley Lake, which burned some Lolo National Forest land, told NewWest.Net that that particular blaze displayed fire activity “firefighters haven’t seen before in this part of the world.”