Later, milder wildfire season likely

Associated Press

SPOKANE — Recent heavy rains and deep snow still in the mountains should delay and soften the Northwest wildfire season this summer, state and federal officials said Thursday.

"We’re looking for an average fire season, primarily east of the Cascades," Paul Werth, a fire weather program manager, said by telephone from the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center in Portland, Ore.

"From the Cascades into Western Washington and Western Oregon, it should actually be a below-normal fire season," he said.

"We expect a warm and dry summer with no extremes," Washington state Department of Natural Resources weatherman Greg Sennett said from Olympia. "At this point, we don’t expect to have as active a fire year as last year, which was a record-setter."

Reservoir storage across the region is down because the water that will fill them is still locked up in snow in the mountains.

Heavy snow that has yet to melt, and prolonged spring rains likely will delay the start of the fire season until late July, Sennett said. That is more than a month later than last year, when four firefighters were killed July 10 while fighting the Thirty Mile Fire in central Washington.

Drought conditions last summer spawned numerous fires and blackened 227,000 acres of land protected by DNR. Various state and federal agencies spent more than $100 million fighting fires in the state.

Last year there were 1,300 fires in the forests of Eastern Washington and the Columbia River Gorge, mostly during July, August and September. Most were minor, but 21 threatened homes and communities.

The DNR expects to fight 1,100 to 1,200 fires, a "normal" season, Sennett said. Most will be started by lightning.

"We aren’t expecting an exceptional number of lightning fires, or others that can cause problems like last year," Sennett said. "We went into the fire season with a serious drought on top of an unusually large number of lightning activity on the east side."

Still, DNR fire officials are taking precautions, spokesman Steve Harris of the agency’s Northeast Region office in Colville said.

The agency plans to sponsor fire prevention activities the third week of June for rural land owners.

"We’re still technically in a drought; something like two inches below normal precipitation at the Spokane International Airport," Harris said. "We’re looking better, but we’re still looking at the possibility of a bad fire season."

Sennett said the agency is wary, despite the surplus of precipitation.

"We gear up for summer and be prepared to take on the conditions as they develop," he said. "We’re still looking down the road at the effects of El Nino setting up for next fall."

The climate phenomenon can affect weather around the world, but the impact should be less than during the strong El Nino of 1997-98, according to forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

El Nino is characterized by an abnormally warm sea surface in the central equatorial Pacific Ocean. That results in increased evaporation and rising air currents that can affect the winds overhead that steer the movement of weather.

Copyright ©2002 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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