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By PATRICK O’DRISCOLL
USA TODAY
DENVER — Drought in the Southwest, dead trees from hurricanes and worrisome dryness elsewhere make the wildfire potential this spring and summer “significantly higher than normal” from Alaska to the East Coast, federal forecasters predict.
Areas at risk are so far-flung that the federal government’s more than 20,000 firefighters and fleets of ground and air support could be spread thin if fire danger lingers long in any one area, says national fire weather manager Rick Ochoa of the Bureau of Land Management.
“This year we’re going to be crisscrossing the country dealing with fires,” says Ochoa, one of about 30 fire managers, meteorologists and others from nine federal agencies who met in Colorado last week to draft the fifth annual National Wildland Fire Outlook. Ochoa expects the report to be released today.
The outlook by the Idaho-based National Interagency Fire Center combines weather and climate forecasts with ground conditions in the nine regions of the country to map the fire potential through summer.
Already more than 2 million acres of timber and grasslands have burned since Jan. 1, a record for this early in the season and a total rarely reached until June even in above-average years, Ochoa says.
The entire Gulf Coast, from bone-dry South Texas to all of Florida, is at higher risk in part because a La Nioa weather pattern has deprived the southern one-third of the continent of its normal parade of winter and spring storms. Relief in the form of thunderstorms may not take hold until June. Vast tracts of trees blown down by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma and vegetation killed by saltwater storm surges means more fuel for fires, Ochoa says.
The East Coast from North Carolina to Maine also rates above-average fire potential because of dryness, and “it continues to escalate,” Ochoa says.
Across the West, winter’s hit-and-miss precipitation means a mixed outlook. “You can draw a line from San Francisco to Denver, and north of that line we’ve generally had normal to above-normal snowpacks, and south of that line, very dry,” he says.
The dividing line is evident in Colorado. Heavy snow covered the state’s central and northern mountains for much of the winter and spring, dampening the fire danger. But in the drier south and along the heavily urban foothills of the Front Range, the eastern slope of the Rockies, conditions are critical. It was so dry in midwinter that two major wildfires burned in areas that normally would have been blanketed in snow.
California, inundated by rain and snow for weeks, is one of the few areas with below-normal fire danger for the summer. Ochoa warns that abundant grass from all that moisture could stoke worse fires in the fall if dry, warm conditions take over.