LAT: Dry Southwest in the Line of Fire (season of "historic severity"?)

Dry Southwest in the Line of Fire
Conditions are prime for what could be a season of 'historic' severity, as large blazes already suggest. And summer's just begun.
By Miguel Bustillo and Nicholas Riccardi, Times Staff Writers
June 25, 2006

SEDONA, Ariz. — A prolonged drought has created ideal wildfire conditions across much of the West and Southwest this summer, alarming forestry officials, who already are dealing with an unusually high number of fires.

Nationwide as of Saturday, officials have reported 54,686 fires charring more than 3.2 million acres this year, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. Both figures are the highest in at least a decade for the same period. The 10-year average for this date is 39,240 fires burning about 1 million acres.

So far, none of the fires has spun out of control, but scientists and forestry officials warned that exceptionally light rains and low humidity in many states have left dry, dead branches and grasses that could ignite like a tinderbox.

"Basically, you have had low precipitation since the late 1990s, and now, a winter in which we got close to no precipitation" in the Southwest, said Chuck Maxwell, a meteorologist with the Department of the Interior who months ago predicted a severe fire season. "The fuel moisture levels are very low. The humidity is very low. There are lots of places now that are as dry as we have ever seen them."

One such place is the scenic red-rock country around the resort town of Sedona, about 90 miles north of Phoenix. Firefighters spent most of last week battling a blaze that threatened to spill down the candy-colored walls of Oak Creek Canyon, a bucolic area just north of town. About 30 businesses and 430 residences — from modest trailers to resorts and million-dollar estates — were evacuated last Sunday....

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-wildfires25jun25,0,7586447.story?coll=la-home-headlines

the few trees I have. This is the first year it's been so dry the lilac (there since 1952) hasn't put out blossoms. It is so dry I don't even have weeds in the yard. Everything in this state is crisp-dry.

The air here, usually crystal clear due to humidity that hovers around 10%, is so hazy with smoke from fires in this state and in Arizona that I can barely see the mountains 10 miles away. The faint smell of smoke is in the air, and we've been under a pollution alert for a week.

We desperately need a Pacific hurricane to come up the Gulf of California and rain itself out over us. We desperately need a restoration of normal weather patterns that give us deep snowpack in the mountains in winter and monsoonal rains in summer.

It's hard to be anything but incredibly sad, watching this area die year after year as the drought continues, the trees die, and fire consumes the remains.

With federal firefighting funds cut and NG personnel and equipment re-deployed to Iraq, the southwestern states are extremely vulnerable.

All it would take is a handful of terrorists with rent cars and matches to unleash a firestorm that could effectively cripple the western third of the US.

The government's inaction just lends more credence to my theory that the "terrorist threat" is not real.

All of those who dissed him and ignored him need to apologize!

Last fire season was also relatively dry, but remarkably few fires for the conditions. Good news? Not exactly, fire fuel levels are astonishing right now. Plenty to burn. :(

Smokey the bear had it utterly, utterly wrong. Western forests are clogged with fuels due to 100 years of active fire exclusion. Most western forests, especially montane forests, historically burned at regular intervals but low intensity-- this kept them fairly thin, with little undergrowth and open lower stories, and prevented fuel accumulation-- all of which limited fire intensity.

Today's western forests are not only packed with explosive fuel, but the thick growth exacerbates the effects of drought, increasing stress on the densely packed trees, making them more vulnerable to insect attacks and fungal pathogens, etc-- a process that accelerates the rate of fuel accumulation. To make matters worse, people are increasingly moving into the canyons and backcountry, converting what was once remote land into high-value residential property AND increasing the risks of human caused fire at the same time.

From an ecological perspective, the best solution is to let them burn, preferably under control if possible. Controlled fires will thin the forests and reduce the fuel loads, but keeping them under control is hard under current conditions. Wildfires will produce stand replacing fires rather than the normally low intensity burns of the historic fire cycles, but if the fuel loads can't be reduced with prescribed fire, then stand replacement and better future management is probably the best outcome.