April showers needed to quash August fires
By Roger Morris, Western News Publisher
Charlie Webster is hoping April showers keep away August wildfires but thus far it¹s not looking good.
³Western Montana isn¹t as bad as other places in the interior West but we¹re shaping up to be bad,² said Webster, the U.S. Forest Service¹s fire management officer for the Kootenai National Forest.
³We always hope April to be very wet but it hasn¹t started off that way,² he said.
In fact, March tailed off with a record high temperature — 82 degrees — for March 30, which was also the highest temperature ever registered in March according to more than 80 years of weather records for Libby.
Also, March marked the third consecutive month that Libby was behind the monthly average for precipitation.
The northwest corner of the state is considered in a moderate drought cycle with five consecutive years of below average precipitation.
³Without a moist spring and June, it could be a bad August again,² Webster said.
Last August, Webster and a slew of state and federal fire crews responded to every sighting of smoke, every area of lightning strike, knocking down potential problems before they started.
Webster said the tension is easier when there are fires to fight rather than knowing the potential exists because of high temperatures, drought conditions and a forest that in many places is overgrown with underbrush and trees.
³Winter up to February was good,² Webster said. ³Now we¹re 85 percent of average for snowpack and we haven¹t been building snowpack in February and March, which we usually do.²
The key for keeping wildfires down is good winter snowpack and wet weather through June, Webster said.
³This is the first time in a long time, I haven¹t seen the creeks running muddy in April,² Webster said. ³That means the ground is soaking up that moisture.²
The Natural Resources Conservation Service is reporting snowpack values decreased by an average of 17 percent during the past month due to dismal March snowfall and warm temperatures. There have been record high March snowmelt rates and temperatures recorded at the 124 SNOTEL sites in Montana and northern Wyoming.
³These record high temperatures, which haven¹t even dropped below freezing at night, cause the mountain snowpack to melt continuously,² said Roy Kaiser, NRCS water supply specialist. ³If the unusually warm weather continues, the snowpack will melt much earlier and could cause streamflows to reach critically low flows much earlier than last year. Much of the snowmelt that has happened so far has gone into the soil and has not occurred as runoff.²
Fifty percent of the states west of the Mississippi are in some phase of drought with the worst areas occurring in Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho and Montana, according to a report from the National Weather Service. Winter snows in the Rockies have not made up for the precipitation deficits extending back four to five years, the report says.
The 2004 fire season is expected to be normal in the expected number of fires and acres burned, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. Much of the interior West has above normal fire potential due to long-term drought conditions and an increasing abundance of fuels in overgrown forests and forests containing drought-killed vegetation, reports the center.
Last year, there were 57,578 reported fires on 3.8 million acres according to the Intergency Fire Center. In Montana, there were 2,326 fires burning 735,619 acres.
Much of the fire publicity during the early part of the summer was centered around the Glacier fires. It quickly changed focus to California, however.
However, in the Northern Region, the Kootenai National Forest had the third most fire start-ups behind the Lolo and Nez Perce national forests.
³In lieu of spring rains we will be well prepared for whatever happens,² Webster said.