2012 Fire Season Review Closed Caption Final
2012 has been a challenging, active, and severe fire season.
Although the number of fires is lower than the 10 year average, the acres burned are
well above, with over 9 million year to date.
2012 has ranked second for acres burned since 1960, following 2006.
More than 19,000 fire personnel were assigned to fire incidents at the peak of the season.
33 National Type 1 teams were mobilized, and National Type 2 teams have been mobilized
80 times; that’s a record since 2000.
Structure losses, firefighter fatalities, and resources mobilized were average for 2012.
Well fire is an evolving incident.
It could be hot and dry today, but tomorrow it might be windy and that’s going to change
the character of the fire.
So on a short term basis, that’s important to know, but on a long term basis, you need
to be able to plan what kind of resources and what kind of effort you’re going to
have to make, to continue to manage that fire, or to prepare for new fire.
So what we do is provide a longer range look at that problem, and give the firefighting
community at all levels some insight into what to expect over the coming days and even
months.
As we started the year, it was an interesting year because the previous months, November-December,
were relatively dry in the West.
We didn’t have a lot of snow in the West, so snow pack was very, very low entering the
month; it wasn’t until the first week of January that we started to have significant
snowfalls last winter.
What ended up happening was we ended up getting these dry cold front events, and if you get
a fire in dry grass it doesn’t matter what time of year it is, you get a little wind
on and it’s going to take off.
As we entered February we got into a pattern of dry conditions in the Western United States,
we weren’t getting a tremendous amount of snow, and even though we had some pretty good
snows in January, we were seeing snow packs beginning to dwindle again, because we weren’t
supplementing that snow, at the time when we typically get a lot of snow in the West.
As we entered March, we continued to see very dry conditions in the Plains and the Central
Rockies, including the Front Range of Colorado, and because of the dry conditions, virtually
no snow pack on the Front Range, any fire start under windy conditions was not a good
thing, and that’s what we saw with the Lower North Fork fire.
It started in very dry conditions, and in an area that has suffered a lot of bug kill
over the last couple of years, so conditions were ideal for fire to spread there.
In April, we typically see fire taking hold in the Southeastern United States.
It’s not unusual to see large fires in Florida in the early spring, but what was unusual
about the fires there this year, is that they were close to very populated areas, and had
tremendous impacts on the population in terms of transportation on the interstates, and
just the effects on the large communities, for example, the large cities of northern
Florida, Jacksonville and that area around there.
May was interesting, in that a very large percentage of the country was very, very warm
and very, very dry, from the Southwest all the way up into the upper Mississippi Valley.
It was the second year in a row they set the state record largest fire for the area, and
it was largely driven by the fact that there was a lack of snow pack, and the forest itself
was suffering from a variety of things-it was very dry, the lack of snow pack, dry fuels,
and other factors like bug kill, and things like that contributed to that fire.
At the beginning of June, we had a large ridge of high pressure stationed over the central
United States, over the Rockies, which brought some very, very warm temperatures to Colorado,
the Plains, all the way down into New Mexico and west Texas.
It was particularly bad for Colorado, because they were already dry, had low precipitation
going through the winter, and now they were seeing temperatures that were very much above
normal, well into the 90’s, and in some cases a few days temperatures over 100 degrees,
and that contributed to extremely dry conditions that led to the Waldo Canyon fire, just outside
of Colorado Springs, which turned out to be one of the largest fires in history for the
state.
We jumped quickly into Planning Level 3, and as we went through the month we started seeing
more fires starting across parts of the country, plus we were seeing some wind events that
were driving the fires very rapidly for several days, that led to very large fires, well over
100 to 200 thousand acres in the region.
By the end of June with the fire activity in Colorado, and across the plains of Montana,
Wyoming, and parts of the Dakotas, we jumped into Planning Level 4 nationally.
The upper ridge that had been sitting over the Central Rockies over June started to slide
farther to the east over the Plains, so it continued to bake the Plains, and now starting
to heat up the upper Midwest, Mississippi Valley, and even the Eastern United States.
Meanwhile, we’re starting to see cooler conditions, slightly cooler conditions, moving
into the Western United States.
We still had some large grass fires; we had the Long Draw fire in July in Oregon, that
burned several hundred thousand acres, mostly wind driven, and that surpassed the previous
large fire in Oregon, which was the Biscuit fire in 2002.
So as we continued to get ideal or more favorable conditions in the West, we’re able to get
a handle on some of the active fires, and we’re not seeing a lot of new fire starts,
so that by the end of the month, we dropped all the way down to Planning Level 2 Nationally,
which was unusual for that time of year.
What really started things in earnest during the month of August, was what we call a breakdown
of the upper ridge.
The ridge that had sitting over the Central United States, at the end of July shifted
back to the West, and while the monsoon remained active, the ridge brought in some hotter and
drier conditions to the Northwest and Northern Rockies for a period of time.
By mid-August, we started to see a significant amount of lightning moving into the Northern
Rockies, and this triggered the three very large fires across the central and northern
Idaho and western Montana, namely the Mustang Complex, the Halstead, and Trinity Ridge fires,
which combined, burned almost 700 thousand acres.
The lightning event that triggered the fires across Idaho and western Montana, also started
fires in the mountains of northern California, during that period, compounding the number
of areas that were battling fires, and requiring a lot of resource commitment.
These large fire,s as well as other fires that were starting to spread in other parts
of the west, moved us into a National Planning Level 4.
As we entered September, we saw the ridge develop farther to the west, bringing more
warm and dry weather to the region, and typically we see fire season start to wind down as you
head into September, but this year was unusual; by mid-September we had another lightning
outbreak, that moved through Washington and Oregon, and started another round of major
fires across parts of central Washington and north-central Oregon.
As we moved into October, we started to see an increase in the number of winter weather
events, and the first one came through the Northwest, bringing a tremendous amount of
snow across the Northwest and Northern Rockies, and even parts of the Northern Plains and
upper Midwest.
We’re still seeing fire actually going on in Minnesota by this time up in northwest
Minnesota, and even these precipitation events are having only minimal impact, because most
of the fires that are burning there are burning in deep fuels, and the precipitation is a
surface moistening, and doesn’t quite reach the deeper layers.
So fire was still and issue across the upper Midwest and the Great Lakes region for a time,
in early October.
Hurricane Sandy was important to the fire organization, because the intensity of a storm
like this has an impact on trees, especially in the fall, when a lot of trees still have
leaves on them.
The wind is very destructive, and brings downs these trees very easily, especially with a
lot of rain.
This created a lot of damage, that required the resources that the fire community had,
namely crews with chainsaws to help clean up the mess, cut down trees, and assist with
some of the recovery in the eastern United States.
In December, the Fern Lake fire, in Estes Park, Colorado blew up, and a Type 1 team
was deployed.
They endured unusually cold conditions, as the fire burned at least one structure, and
approximately 3500 acres, before it was declared out.
So going forward into the winter, we will continue to produce monthly outlooks that
cover the next month, plus the following three month period, and as we get deeper into the
winter, and have a better idea of what kind of weather, what kind of snow pack and precipitation
patterns we have developed, we’ll get a better idea of what kind of impact that will
have on the fire season.
And it’s important to monitor our outlooks, which come out every month, to determine what
areas are evolving into high risk areas for fire, to be able to plan ahead, and make sure
that all the resources that are needed are available, and that the appropriate actions
are taken to ensure firefighter safety, and as well as the public.
Predictive Services issues the Wildland Fire Outlook at the beginning of every month.
Please visit the Predictive Service website for more information.
And for more information regarding wildland fire, please visit the National Interagency
Fire Center website.