Fire Season

Fire Season. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. The fire season will soon be here and forests and grasslands all over the NW can quickly become raging infernos that demand hours of fire fighters attentions not to mention the dollars that rack up in the effort. Dan O'Brien is the Center Manager for the NW Coordination Center where all forest and wildfire information is gathered and disseminated. He says the weather we've been experiencing has been both good news and bad news. O'BRIEN: Certainly the rain that began in April and continued through all of April and most of May and a little bit of June – really what it did was catch us up on a lot of our precipitation through the winter. We received considerably more snowpack than we had existing at the end of March so in many ways it has been a good thing. It's kept the fire season from starting pre-maturely and it's allowed us some breathing space. In past years that have started out on the dry side and just remained that way fire season has come early and continued, draining time, money and the resources of fire fighters across the region. O'Brien says this year is different in that regard. O'BRIEN: As it stands now it looks like fire season won't begin now prior to it's normal times which is the end of June, early July around the 4th of July usually which just gives us more prep time so that's a good thing. But there is a down side to all this rain we have been having across the NW. O'BRIEN: It provides the necessary moisture for vegetation at lower elevations to grow more profusely. The grass crop grows a lot better than it normally does just because it has more moisture. Once it does dry out and that grass crop cures we have a more extensive fuel bed which means fire will be able to spread much easier over a greater extent because of a continuous fuel bed. He does say that even though grass fires are the fastest moving they tend to be short in duration and the easiest to put out. Bottom line according to O'Brien...be aware. O'BRIEN: If you're out camping, if you're out recreating in any way, shape or form you should be careful with cigarettes, you should be careful with campfires and so on. If you are running a chainsaw out cutting wood or something like that you should carry your fire extinguisher and your shovel and that sort of stuff that you need to take quick action on any small starts that you may cause. And the idea that just be aware. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.