West Bracing for a Fierce Fire Season

With a handful of stubborn wildfires exhausting crews Monday from the West Coast to the Rocky Mountains, fire bosses said they are bracing for a hellish late summer.

The early arrival of fire season is causing trepidation--especially here in Nevada, where firefighters say last year’s record-book blazes have set the stage for a potentially disastrous sequel.

About 1.6 million acres of grazing lands burned last summer in Nevada--and those grasses have been replaced by cheatgrass, an Asian grass that is especially combustible. Once cheatgrass ignites, it creates as much heat, pound for pound, as gasoline, and can spread faster than firefighters can encircle it, said Steve Frady, spokesman for the Nevada Division of Forestry.

Foot-tall cheatgrass has carpeted the state more thickly than ever, Frady said, and is turning tinder-dry a month earlier than normal.

Already, fires burning throughout the state are frustrating fire crews, although few structures have been lost. “Many of our resources are running thin,” Frady said Monday. “They’re very tired because the fires are wearing them down.”

A fire in central Nevada, north of Tonopah, had burned about 6,000 acres by late Monday after starting Saturday and spreading through rugged, grassy terrain peppered with aspen, mountain mahogany and pinion junipers. About 260 firefighters were battling it.

A second fire near Reno began Sunday and had burned about 1,000 acres. It was expected to be contained today by 200 firefighters.

About 100 firefighters were getting the upper hand on a third fire that had burned about 500 acres northeast of Ely.

None of the blazes compare to a 20,000-acre blaze that was burning out of control Monday in Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado. It was heading toward the park’s famous Cliff Palace cliff dwellings, and was burning so intensely that firefighters abandoned a direct attack on its front and instead were trying to create firebreaks ahead of its path.

Among several fires burning in California on Monday was a 5,500-acre blaze scorching pinion juniper in the Panamint Mountains about 20 miles north of Trona, adjoining Death Valley National Park.

A wilderness blaze 15 miles northeast of Kernville, in Sequoia National Forest, had burned about 5,100 acres by Monday, and in the coastal Padres National Forest, 25 miles north of Cambria, 1,500 acres had burned.

Smaller fires already have burned in Riverside and San Diego counties, and in Northern California.

“It looks like we’re going to be in for a rough year,” said Stephen Johnson, a fire information officer for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Riverside. “We’re already at a Level 4, and that’s as high as we go.”

The reasons vary from location to location, he said, but are either a result of higher temperatures where precipitation has been about normal, or normal temperatures where precipitation has been less than average.

Officials at the National Interagency Coordination Center in Boise said firefighting resources already are stretched thin, and supervisors were having to set priorities.

“We’re running out of most everything,” said Ron Dunton, fire boss for the Bureau of Land Management. “We have enough resources for a typical season when two or three of the 11 geographic areas are active, but not when we have many large fires occurring at once from the Rocky Mountains to the West Coast. Some fires are not getting the resources they need.

“We’re experiencing fire conditions we would normally expect in mid-August,” Dunton said.

The Nevada range land fires might seem of little consequence to Californians “who wonder, ‘What’s the big deal? There’s nothing to burn,’ ” said Frank Siracusa, who heads Nevada’s Division of Emergency Management.

But last year’s fires cost millions to the Nevada economy because of the loss of grazing land for cattle ranchers, he said.

Cattle feed had to be trucked in to ranchers in northern Nevada, he said, and some cattle had to be relocated to range land in other parts of the state.

Nevada’s fire outlook is gloomy, Frady said, because the cheatgrass thrived during the relatively moderate winter months but dried out during a warmer than usual spring.

Unlike forest fires, desert range fires can be expected to occur across the same areas as they did last year because of the presence of even more cheatgrass, Frady said.

Last year’s fires occurred mostly in August, ignited by lightning storms that plowed across the northern half of the state.

“We don’t have a crystal ball, but if we have the kind of lightning activity we did last summer, we can anticipate the same kind of fire activity,” Frady said. “And last year’s was the worst we’ve ever had.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Summer Wildfire Forecast

Fire officials say many Western areas are at greater risk than normal for wildfires.

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Source: National Interagency Fire Center