The perfect conditions

MINERAL/SANDERS COUNTY – The damage caused by wildfires burning across the state of Montana and several other states in the region have provided a graphic picture of the state of area forests and the threat posed to nearby communities according to officials and experts familiar with the situation.

With some areas of the forest floor littered with dead trees stacked on top of each other like a giant game of pick up sticks, the forest is ripe for extreme fire activity. Toss in drought conditions, a below average snowpack and strained firefighting resources and what the region has is a wildfire season that currently has over 170 fires burning almost two million acres according to information from the National Interagency Fire Center.

According to statistics from the NIFC website, 44,080 fires have burned 8.4 million acres to date in 2015. By comparison, only 2.7 million acres burned in 2014. The amount of acreage burned in 2015 is the most since 2012 when over 9 million acres burned and the season is far from over. According to information released by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the federal government has already spent over $1 billion fighting fires in 2015.

Supervisory Research Ecologist Bob Keane with the U.S. Forest Service said last month alone was one of the most expensive months in the history of wildland firefighting. Keane said the problem with the forests, fires and their proximity to people and property was extremely complex.

“Last week, we spent the most ever in a month fighting wildfire,” Keane said. “We have had bigger and bigger fire seasons over the last few decades. What makes this year different is we’ve had a lot of large fires everywhere. Even regions of the country that usually stay moist have seen fire activity.”

Keane said, in order to examine the bigger picture as to what all the large fires burning around the country mean in a larger context, the history of the land as well as human and fire activity has to be taken into consideration.

“Prior to European settlement, fires were much more frequent than they are now,” Keane said. “What happens when you have more frequent fires is, not only do previous fires prevent the spread of future fires, but the fires also don’t get as big. If there is fuel in front of them, they will just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. In the past, most fires hit a previous burn area so they became self-limiting. Also, because there were more fires, there was less vegetation and less forest.”

According to Keane, the severity of future fire seasons is tough to predict. He said a combination of climate change, weather cycles and fuel mitigation could all potentially impact how much of the region and other parts of the country are affected by wildfire.

“No one really knows what’s going to happen in the future because we have this clash of cycles,” Keane said. “We have a greenhouse effect going on. We don’t know if climate change is going to continue to create these hot, dry summers in the northern Rockies like we’ve seen in the last decade.”

Keane said one of the main problems that gets lost in some of the science is the amount of dead, fallen trees littering the forest floor in many areas. He said suppressing fires since the Great Burn of 1910, which torched 10 million acres in three days across much of the region, has successfully prevented most fires from encroaching on populated areas but the side effect has been the build up of fuel for wildfires.

“Nature doesn’t stop,” Keane said. “So biomass will continue to accumulate in these areas. So what we’ve done through fire exclusion is create landscapes where fuel loads are higher. Climate is probably the biggest driver of bigger fires but without fuels to burn, the fires wouldn’t get as big. So what we get are fires that move from one landscape to another. Fire management around the world is reaching a nexus where something has to happen.”

One of the biggest challenges facing Keane, other fire scientists and firefighters as well as the entire Forest Service is how to address the issue of wildfire suppression.

Keane said continuing to put fires out is necessary to protect people and property. But it also puts lives in danger and saps resources that are already stretched to the limit as seen this year with the Forest Service calling in reserves from other countries and, in some places, the National Guard.

“If we fight a fire today, it could mean the lives of firefighters tomorrow,” Keane said. “The fuel could become so dense that it creates such an intense fire that could put people in harm’s way. So it really is a conundrum. We have known this for a long time. But unfortunately, for a long time, fire management has been based on fire suppression. We need to reduce fuels around homes and property but we also need to let fires that are in remote areas burn. Putting out all fires is not the solution. It’s impossible.”

Experts estimate the Canyon Creek Fire in Oregon could burn until winter. In Mineral County, fire officials predicted the West Fork Fish Creek Fire could burn until the end of November. And while firefighting resources in Mineral and Sanders County have been largely successful in protecting people and property, with private land in such close proximity to areas with large amounts of deadfall trees on the forest floor, the threat to the public still looms in the area.

As far as the rest of the 2015 fire season, the outlook remains bleak. NIFC Predictive Services issued information on Sept. 1 that indicated “significant fire potential will remain above normal” for northwestern Montana and other states in the region. The report also stated drought conditions persist in northwestern Montana a result of lower than normal snowpack last winter.