An extremely dry spring and a potentially drier than normal summer could be the recipe for a significant wildfire season in the Northwest.
“We are expecting another very active and busy fire weather season for the western U.S.,” said Steve Bodnar, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Spokane. “We just have to plan for it and cross our fingers (that) maybe we dodge a bullet.”
Bodnar spoke to about 25 firefighters and fire officials from various agencies across the Palouse Thursday night at Moscow Fire Station 2 next to the Latah County Fairgrounds. The barbecue event is held each year.
Bodnar said precipitation levels were well below normal March through May in north Idaho and eastern Washington.
“Many locations from Whitman County into north Idaho have had record dry springs and some of those records go back 100, 150 years,” Bodnar said. “So this is a very significant dry spring that we’ve seen here.”
He said north Idaho and eastern Washington is under a moderate to extreme drought and the soil moisture is 5 percent to 10 percent or less of what it normally is. Moscow is about 5 inches below normal precipitation accumulation so far.
“That’s really going to be tough to overcome as we now head into our dry season,” Bodnar said.
Above normal temperatures and drier than normal conditions are favored July through September on the Palouse, according to the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center.
Bodnar said he believes that by the end of June, the area will have mid-July type fire fuel conditions.
“The potential is really there to be really bad,” Monte McMillan, Moscow Rural Fire District commissioner, told the Daily News regarding the fire season.
McMillan’s crews will have two new brush trucks at their disposal. McMillan said the $325,000 and $210,000 trucks are expected to arrive next month.
Mike McManus, assistant fire warden for the Idaho Department of Lands office in Deary, said at Thursday’s meeting that the department is operating at full capacity and is ready to go.
According to an IDL news release Thursday, department firefighters have responded this year to 99 wildfires that burned 433 acres on state and private lands protected by the IDL.
IDL firefighters and crews from the Clearwater-Potlatch Timber Protective Association and Southern Idaho Timber Protective Association have held 90 of those fires to less than 10 acres, with many of the fires contained at less than an acre.
“It’s early in the fire season, and we’ve already seen three times as many acres burned this year over the 20-year average,” Josh Harvey, IDL’s Fire Bureau chief, said in the release. “Unfortunately, 95 percent of these fires were human caused and could have been prevented. We are ready to suppress fires, but we need the public to help us by not starting wildfires.”
June 18, 2021 at 02:00PM
https://dnews.com/local/dry-spring-equals-high-alert/article_0a34fa76-3e8d-57f8-89b3-66f101a708bb.html
Dry spring equals high alert | Local | dnews.com - Moscow-Pullman Daily News
https://news.google.com/search?q=dry&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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