Fire Threat Is Red-Hot in Parched West

Park ranger David Eaker walks through a field thick with grass as tall as his waist and deceptive in its greenery.

Don’t think for a minute, he says, that the drought is over and the risk of fire has decreased in the West.

Spring rains here and elsewhere have nourished fresh growth, belying the continuing, deep effects of the drought. For the last three years, Zion has been too dry even for grass, and now long-dormant grass seeds have sprouted across meadows and mesas.

“But this will all be brown by late June or early July,” Eaker said, “and when it dries out, it will be nothing but fine fuel.”

If the grass ignites, whether from a tourist’s cigarette in Zion Canyon or by lightning strikes in the upper reaches of the vermilion-streaked sandstone mountains, the brittle ponderosa and pinyon pines and junipers will burst into flames.

Last summer, fires burned 7.1 million acres and 815 homes and other structures, mostly in the West. Zion escaped with eight small fires, scorching only 18 acres.

With parched forests and weather conditions that are expected to remain dry and hot, fire officials are braced for another dangerous season of wildfires. Eaker’s park is almost dead center in the region where the drought will persist, according to projections issued Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center.

The forecast through August shows that the drought, which began in 1999, may worsen from southern Idaho and southwestern Wyoming southward to the Mexican border. Some of the regions last summer experienced the driest months in recorded history, with trees drier than kiln-dried lumber.

Ed O’Lenic, senior meteorologist at the Climate Prediction Center, said heavier-than-normal rainfall is expected in late July and August across southern Nevada, Arizona, southern Utah, western Colorado and much of New Mexico. Still, he said, there won’t be enough rain to erase the ravages caused by three years of sustained drought.

While the coastline areas from San Diego to Seattle are drought-free, conditions change rapidly within miles and remain bleak across entire states. In woodlands from the San Bernardino Mountains to the high desert of Santa Fe, N.M., hundreds of thousands of acres of ponderosa and pinyon pine -- the most prevalent trees of the arid West -- are dead or dying, weakened first by a lack of moisture and then by burrowing insects.

“Even if we get above-normal rainfall, we may still see extreme fire behavior,” said Tom Wordell, wildland fire analyst for the U.S. Forest Service. Computer modeling, he said, predicts that fire will spread at twice the normal rate among the weakened trees.

A key to firefighting is anticipating where fires will break out and placing personnel and equipment in the region ahead of time, said Kim Christensen, who coordinates firefighting logistics at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.

The fire center predicts wildfires by charting which forests are the densest because they have burned the least in recent years, analyzing the moisture content of the most flammable trees and brush, and monitoring weather fronts that may spawn lightning-laced thunderstorms.

A handful of firefighters can be assigned to areas of advancing lightning storms and, in the most vulnerable areas, hundreds of firefighters and air tankers, managed by a military-like command structure, can be positioned for a quick response. About 99% of fires are extinguished by the first firefighters on the scene, officials said.

Last year at this time, when big fires already were burning in New Mexico and Arizona, thousands of firefighters were flown to a staging area in Albuquerque, cutting response time by several days.

On July 31, the busiest day of last year’s fire season, 31 large blazes were burning across the nation, 148 new fires erupted and fire bosses had to decide where to dispatch 28,000 wildland firefighters, 1,205 engines, 30 air tankers and 188 helicopters.

Because this year’s fire season has started more slowly, air tankers have been sent only to Alaska and Minnesota, where current weather conditions make them more susceptible to wildfires.

In another effort to reduce fires, foresters throughout the country, in line with the 2-year-old National Fire Plan, are thinning woods. Most of last summer’s worst fires gorged on forests overgrown with small trees and brush because of a decades-long national policy to extinguish fires as quickly as possible. Had fires been allowed to burn in previous years, experts concede, those forests would have provided less fuel for subsequent fires.

Some environmental groups have filed lawsuits to block forest thinning, and neighboring communities have complained about the smoke of prescribed fires. But public opposition is waning because “there’s a much broader awareness of the relationship between overly dense forests and large, difficult-to-control fires,” said Tim Hartzell, who heads the wildland fire coordination office for the National Park Service.

“Our approach is very surgical, targeting the highest-priority areas, especially in terms of preventing a fire from roaring into a town,” he said.

Fire officials have identified about 190 million acres of federal land, mostly in the West, that are considered at high risk for catastrophic blazes this summer. Of that, 2.4 million acres were thinned last year and an additional 1.4 million acres have been thinned so far this year, said Corbin Newman, who coordinates the National Fire Plan for the U.S. Forest Service.

Crews thin specific areas in forests where the spread of fire can best be slowed, he said, with greater attention to areas near residential development or areas that are critical for watershed and wildlife habitat.

Fiercely burning fires are only one outgrowth of the drought. Farmers have less water for crops, and with hay and alfalfa production retarded, cattlemen are supplementing feed for their breeding stock with federal-surplus powdered milk. Environmentalists from Northern California’s Klamath Basin to New Mexico’s Rio Grande want water released from reservoirs to sustain endangered fish, at the expense of farmers and urban dwellers complaining of water restrictions.

In Colorado, a late-winter snowstorm has allowed Boulder to lift water restrictions, but in nearby Aurora, which relies on a different watershed, there is a continuing prohibition against the planting of sod, restrictions on new developments and limits to landscape watering.

“We didn’t get in the drought in a year and we won’t get out of it in a year,” said Jack Byers, deputy state engineer for the Colorado Division of Water Resources.

The Western Governors’ Assn. pushed unsuccessfully last year for Congress to assign a federal agency to oversee drought planning and response. New legislation will be reintroduced in coming weeks, said Nebraska Gov. Mike Johanns.

“Drought is every bit as significant a natural disaster as a tornado, hurricane or flood,” Johanns said. “But federal policy in this area has been very hit-and-miss. We need to focus the best science available on predicting drought and in planning strategies to respond to it.”

Politics aside, park ranger Eaker is wrestling with realities. Crews at Zion, in southwestern Utah, are thinning trees near park employee residences, and firefighters remain alert to thunderheads that may unleash lightning.

“Last year at this time the flow of water through our fork of the Virgin River was 5% of normal,” he said.

“It’s now flowing at 40% of normal, but soil moisture is still low, and now we have more grass fuel than we’ve seen in years. Our anxiety about fire is as high as ever.”