Fire Season Heats Up

We knew it would happen. The first wildfire of the season took off over the weekend in southern Idaho. The first burned some 7,000 acres near Celebration Park in Canyon County before it was contained on Sunday evening. It was called in to the Bureau of Land Management around noon on Saturday and high winds spread the fire quickly. Officials are urging everyone to use extreme caution when in fire prone areas.

Secretaries, Sally Jewell from the Department of Interior, Tom Tidwell from the U.S. Forest Service and Ag's Tom Vilsack held a press conference yesterday announced above average fire activity projections for the upcoming 2015 fire wildfire season. Tidwell talks about the outlook.

TIDWELL: As we look at the rest of the summer you'll see the interior part of the country will dry out to a normal fire season while California, Oregon, Washington and Northern Idaho moving into Montana will see conditions deteriorate and we're predicting above average fire season. The best way to describe this is it looks like we're set up to have a very similar fire season as we had last year where we saw seven of the ten largest fires occur in California, Oregon and Washington. Once again, it looks like we're going to have another very active fire season.

That's today's Northwest Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network of the West.