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They're waiting for the big one

Elkhunter

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They're waiting for the big one


Will this year see yet another series of forest blazes?


AT THE start of this summer, Michael Dondero, chief of fire and aviation for the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in Nevada, checked, as he always does, the instruments that measure humidity in his forest. To his dismay, the forest was as dry in mid-May as it should have been in late June. This was at least as bad as the figures for 1988, 1998, 2000 and 2002—all terrible years for forest fires.

Similar fears are being voiced throughout the west. The same five-year drought that is prompting talk of water rationing in Los Angeles and putting landscaping companies out of business in Colorado has left forests parched. Mr Dondero has already had to deal with several fierce blazes: one even jumped an eight-lane freeway. There have been nasty fires in California, New Mexico and Arizona. And the peak season—July and August—is still to come.

It is easy to get blasé about fires: they are as much part of western summertime as baseball. Even a relatively mild fire season, like last year's, can blanket large parts of Montana and Wyoming in late-summer smoke. As usual, optimists are praying for rain, and pessimists are watching out anxiously for “dry lightning” storms, which they fear could set off a record blaze.

The pessimists have the better case, for three reasons. The first is the drought: dry trees are not just easier to burn, they are also weaker, because they are more vulnerable to disease and insects. Roger Pielke, a climatologist with Colorado State University, points out that the west is vulnerable to long droughts: the current weather pattern could last for another two years—or maybe 100. Some climatologists think the drought is the product of a reaction between El Niño, a seasonal climate shift, and a longer-term phenomenon called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Others worry about global warming.

There is another argument, about whether a half-century of fire prevention has made things worse. By doing such a good job of stopping fires happening, man has actually prevented nature from cleaning up the underbrush and dead timber. Now some 180m acres of western forests—an area nearly twice the size of California—have unnaturally thick accumulations of young trees and brush, the stuff fire scientists refer to as “fine fuels”. The biggest blaze in recent history, the Biscuit fire in southern Oregon, which burned 500,000 acres, fed off this scrub.

Last year, the Bush administration started a $500m-a-year programme to start thinning excess trees. Greens howled that this was an effort to circumvent logging laws. But it currently reduces fire risks on only about 2.5m acres per year.

Now a third worry looms: how will fire-fighters cope without aircraft? A standard feature of all recent big fire-fights has been a fleet of 33 “aerial retardant tankers”, old propeller-driven planes that “bomb” blazes with hundreds of gallons of red-tinted chemicals. But, after several crashes, the Forest Service and the Interior Department have pulled back these aircraft, many of which are nearly 50 years old.

That leaves helicopters and some more modern aircraft: but they cannot carry as much liquid. Senators Max Baucus and Conrad Burns of Montana (coincidentally home to one of the larger tanker contractors) are working to reverse the cancellation. If the big one does come, the fire-fighters will need all the help they can get.


http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2771462
 
No matter what the theory, or what the take, looks like I will be in good work for quite a while to come.... :D :D :D
 
I would sure hope so, especially if the fires are all over MT. again, there are lots of places fires happen that there could and will be very good elk pockets. Might as well get paid to scout...
 

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