Drought makes bigger fires

Without rains, and substantial rains, the 2013 fire season is likely to be nasty. The forest fuel specialist for the Lincoln National Forest's Smokey Bear Ranger District, Kim Kuhar, said long-term drought has changed things. "We're dealing with a different animal now than 20 or even 30 years ago on what fires are doing," Kuhar said. "The ERCs (energy release component -the heat release value at the head of a fire based on the moisture content of fuels, both live and dead), when they're up in the 80s, that's when we can expect large fires, one of those things we can plot out and look at over time and make some predictions. But what you want to look at is what was extreme in the '70s and '80s is now really more moderate now. That's telling you that things have dried out. It has nothing to do with vegetative density. It has nothing to do with the distribution of vegetation on the land. It has to do with how dry it is." Kuhar said history shows fires on the Lincoln National Forest became more plentiful and larger during the 2000s. "We're in climate change for whatever reason and things are drying out and we're seeing these large fires. In 1988, everybody remembers the Yellowstone Fire - it burned a million acres. And wow, that was a biggie then. Well, in 2002 we had the Rodeo-Chediski Fire in Arizona. And you have to think of it like this: The fires in Yellowstone started in July and they were a million acres in September. The Rodeo-Chediski started and in 10 days it was a half-million acres. So that's what we're dealing with is really, really large-scale changes, not only in the size of our fires but how frequently they happen." History Historic data for the Lincoln National Forest showed from 1971 to 1980 there were three fires of more than 1,000 acres forest-wide. The number doubled to six from 1981 to 1990, and 1991 to 2000. From 2001 through 2012 there were 16 large fires. During the 2000s, there also was a significant increase in ERCs. Fire sizes also increased significantly during the 2000s, with the largest fire of the decade in 2002. The Pepin Fire on the Capitan Mountains consumed more than 64,000 acres. In 2012, the Lincoln National Forest recorded 31 wildfires. A fire of 100 acres today, could be 30,000 acres by tomorrow morning, Kuhar said in an apparent reference to last year's Little Bear Fire...more