Fire season tamer than expected; U.S. burn acreage far below average

A wildfire season that began with dire warnings that dry conditions had set the stage for a year of flames across California and the West turned out to be among the quietest of the past decade. Although 2013 was marked by two high-profile blazes, one in California and the other in Arizona, nationally the total wildfire acreage, 4.15 million, is far below the 10-year average of 6.8 million acres. “All of the modeled conditions supported a lot of significant fire potential,” said Jeremy Sullens, a wildfire analyst at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise. “But in reality, because of the drought we actually had less fuel on the landscape than we would in a normal year.” In Nevada -- often the scene of huge, racing wildfires fueled by invasive cheatgrass -- only about 163,000 acres were blackened. Late winter and spring storms in the South and an active summer monsoon season in the Southwest kept a lid on burn acreage in those regions. Still, 2013 will be remembered for a lethal blaze in Arizona and the largest wildfire recorded in the Sierra Nevada in more than a century of record keeping...more