More than 8.2 million acres of state and federal lands were scorched across the country during the 2005 wildfire season, the most since the record year of 2000 and nearly double an average fire year.
"But it wasn't really a bad fire season per se," said Terry Marsha, a U.S. Department of Interior fire weather analyst in Portland, Ore. "This could be characterized as a grass fire and rangeland fire year throughout the West rather than a timber fire year."
The season-ending "National Wildland Fire Outlook" report, issued last week by state and federal fire forecasters in the interagency National Predictive Services Group, which has its headquarters in Boise, found the 56,850 fires reported in the 2005 season was 81 percent of average while the more than 12,700 square miles burned was 177 percent of average. The report covers wildfire activity on state and federal land across the United States, although a majority of the burning occurs in the Western United States and Alaska.
In the West this season, heavy spring rains spurred record growth of grassy fuels in rangelands while a cool summer in the higher elevations kept timber stands moist.
"Often this season, we saw fires that started in the grass, then went out as soon as they got into timber," Marsha said.
More than half the acreage burned this season was in Alaska, where 4.4 million acres had burned through Oct. 30, compared with an annual average of 1.4 million but short of the historical high of 6.6 million acres in 2002. The western Great Basin region of eastern Nevada, western Utah and southern Idaho accounted for more than 1 million acres burned this year, compared with the annual average of 379,000 acres.
"Nevada as a state was way higher than normal," said Anne Jeffery of the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise. "There were areas in Nevada that traditionally had 500 pounds per acre of fine, grassy fuels that were showing 2,000 to 3,000 pounds of grass per acre this season."
Federal agencies are still calculating 2005 suppression costs, but the Department of the Interior's running tally Tuesday was $258 million, not counting the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Figures from the Forest Service, part of the Department of Agriculture, were not immediately available.
Marsha said most officials expect that the final firefighting price tag for 2005 will be low in contrast to the acreage burned.
"Something like a 20,000- to 25,000-acre fire in southeastern Oregon doesn't cost as much as a 50-acre fire on the west slope of the Cascades in Washington," he said. "It's a huge discrepancy in cost when you have fire in a high-value resource like timber near where people live."
In the 2000 wildfire season, 8.4 million acres burned and federal agencies' share of the suppression cost was $1.3 billion. Last year, federal agencies spent $890 million to fight fires that burned a total of 4.8 million acres.
Although the 2005 fire season was not marked by large swaths of burned-over timber, environmentalists are bracing for a battle with Congress over forthcoming legislation to step up "salvage logging" sales on blackened national forests. The Bush administration and timber industry leaders maintain that removing commercially valuable timber from burned stands will speed forest rejuvenation, discourage insect infestation and reduce fuel levels for future fires.
"Post-fire logging is proposed in nearly every Western state today," said Lisa Dix of the American Lands Alliance in Washington, D.C., which Tuesday released a report contending that logging burned-over areas does more environmental harm than good. "But there is no ecological emergency to log after fires and natural disturbances."
The group's report points to the 1988 Yellowstone National Park fires and the 2002 Biscuit fire in southern Oregon and northern California as examples of forests that bounced back to ecological health after burning without the need for extensive salvage logging.
"Those are now some of the rarest and most diverse forests in the West," said Dominick DellaSala, director of the Klamath-Siskiyou Program for the World Wildlife Fund. "They are not moonscapes."Anchorage Daily News
