Fires making history

With wildfires this summer having covered more than 144,000 acres in Northwest Montana — including more than a dozen separate fires of more than a thousand acres each — top fire officials battling the rapidly growing blazes are unanimously predicting this year will be one for the history books.

“I think it’s easy to say this is unprecedented,” said Greg Poncin, a Kalispell-based incident commander who oversees one of 16 Type I Incident Management Teams in the country.

Currently working on a complex of fires in central Idaho, he and his team previously were assigned to the Reynolds Creek Fire, one of the region’s first major wildfires that scorched nearly 5,000 acres in Glacier National Park and forced evacuations near the town of St. Mary.

“I’ve seen fire seasons that have started much earlier, but nothing that has been so intense over such a short period of time, and I’m drawing back from the ’88 season when Yellowstone burned and we had the Canyon Creek Fire,” Poncin said Thursday.

Part of the reason this year has already been so extreme, Poncin said, has been the record-setting heat waves and lack of moisture, which in turn have set historical records for measurements of the potential for fuels to burn.

“There are areas where we experience fire routinely, and those are typically lighter fuels,” he explained. “These places that are typically wet and rarely burn are now available to burn, are burning well and are very hard to put out.”

Shawn Pearson, incident commander on the Northeast Kootenai Complex — which includes the Marston Fire east of Fortine — agreed, saying Friday that it also creates challenges for firefighters who can normally depend on moister, riparian areas not to burn.

“We’re talking about timber that’s cedar and hemlock, and you walk through that stuff a lot of years and think, ‘This isn’t going to burn a lot,’” he said. “It’s burning through those wetter fuel types more like slash timber.”

He compared the 2015 season to 2003, when 310,000 acres burned in Northwest Montana, including the giant Robert and Wedge Canyon fires that torched tens of thousands of acres in the Whitefish Range and burned deep into Glacier National Park.

This year, the fire numbers continue to climb exponentially.

By Saturday afternoon, more than 1,000 firefighters and other personnel were staffing incident management teams at the four major fire complexes in the region, and the cost of fire suppression in Northwest Montana had totaled more than $26 million.

In 2003, firefighting efforts cost $100 million.

Major fires burning in the Flathead and Kootenai national forests were responsible for doubling the overall burned area between Tuesday — when the total rested at about 70,000 acres — and Saturday evening, at which point fires had marched across more than 144,000 acres.

Spotted Bear Ranger District, occupying a wide swath of the Flathead National Forest and the Great Bear and Bob Mashall Wilderness areas, was hit hard by a series of lightning storms in mid-August, and the resulting Bear Creek Fire has grown to more than 67,000 acres southwest of the Spotted Bear Ranger Station.

The district’s assistant fire management officer, Jim Flint, compared this fire season to 2003 and 2007 but noted that this year the rash of fires came when nationwide resources were already stretched thin.

“The way our starts gained, basically 30 starts in two, three days, and at the same time the rest of the Northwest and Northern California was being real active, so resources were committed elsewhere,” he said. “By the time you get them to bear, with the fuel dryness here, you’re just not really going to have much success.”

“If we got a fire a day for 30 days, we’d be in a different place,” he added.

Almost 90,000 acres are involved in the district’s Bear Creek and Trail Creek fires alone, yet only 120 personnel were assigned to the entire district, according to a Saturday morning report.

In the northern extent of the Flathead Forest and in Glacier National Park, the team fighting the Thompson-Divide Complex fires is similarly feeling the pinch.

Hours after the community of Essex was evacuated Thursday ahead of the fast-growing Sheep Fire, deputy incident commander Mike Goicoechea said he had finally gotten a hotshot crew, something his team had been requesting for 15 days since taking over management of the fire.

Still, he called the extent of resource demand throughout the West “an anomaly,” and estimated that in a normal fire year he would expect three times the number of personnel currently assigned to the fire complex.

“I would call it an epic year,” said Diane Hutton, the incident commander for the Clark Fork Complex fires near Noxon.

By Friday morning, Hutton’s team was battling a 14,400-acre complex with just 323 personnel.

It’s the first time she’s seen such an acute nationwide strain on firefighting resources, particularly given the unique challenges for her management team. The complex has forced multiple evacuations and spans two states (and two time zones), four counties and four ranger districts, threatening structures, rail lines, a fish hatchery, a dam with high-intensity power lines, mines and the historic Ross Creek Cedar Grove.

“In a normal year, I think you’d get the resources you’d need to get full suppression on many of these fires,” she said. “At this point, with the size they are, it would take Patton’s army to get on them.”

Still, she praised officials responsible for assigning equipment and personnel and noted that fire teams have gotten a resource boost from other countries including Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

“I think the folks managing the prioritization of resources are doing a pretty good job of getting people and resources where they need them. However, there’s just not enough to go around.”

She added that aside from the longer-term heat and dryness seen this spring and summer, the prevailing weather through August has also contributed to the season’s extreme wildfire potential finally becoming a reality.

“Normally, we’d be having rain showers up here, off and on, but we’re getting hot, dry wind events,” she said. “The normal progression of the season is, you get a fire, you get around it, put it out and move on, but these are all going to be long-duration fires, mainly because of the drought and size of the fires. There are so many of them, and we’re getting no relief in sight.”

For fire officials, a season-ending event, be it the first snow or a heavy rain, can’t come soon enough.

“I remember fire seasons where we rolled into the first week of October waiting for that season-ending event,” Pearson said. “But right now I think we would take that season-slowing event, to be honest with you.”

This year, one event might not do the trick.

During a Friday afternoon briefing for officials at the Thompson-Divide Complex, fire behavior analyst David Greathouse said he looks at a range of data, including seasonal weather patterns, fire activity and fuel indices to predict when that event might occur.

“It’s going to take more than one of these season-ending events to slow a fire,” he said. “I think as time goes on, this fire season is just going to kind of fade away.”

This week could give the region’s firefighters some long-awaited relief, with lower temperatures, higher humidities and a lull in wind activity in the forecast.

But the end of 2015’s historic fire season is likely still a long ways off.

“I think it’s important to note that we still have four weeks of fire season left, and there’s a lot that’s going to happen over the next four weeks,” Poncin said. “I hope I’m wrong, and we get rain and this is the worst of it, but we’re planning for kind of a long battle here.”

Reporter Samuel Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.