we were expecting 2013 to be an epic
fire season due to drought lack of
precipitation and volatile fuel
conditions but fire danger decreased due
to some late spring storms and a strong
summer monsoon in the southwest going
into fire season 2013 with the
conditions that we had been seeing over
the previous couple of years and the
very rapid drying conditions we saw at
the beginning of the year in the West we
expected to see a fairly significant
fire season particularly across the west
coast states going up into December we
had pretty good precipitation across the
West good snowfall across the Sierras
and in the interior mountains but
something happened in January where
everything just kind of shut off we were
seeing huge deficits that as we headed
into the spring months we're going to be
very critical to the kind of fire season
that we were going to get so areas like
Colorado and Wyoming where they had a
pretty good snow pack it was gone pretty
quickly and so they were starting out in
a very warm and dry condition earlier in
the spring that's when we started seeing
fires developing in the Front Range of
Colorado the black forest fire started
on jun 11th in Black Forest Colorado it
burned fourteen thousand two hundred and
eighty acres destroyed over 500 homes
and resulted in two civilian fatalities
this was the most destructive wildfire
in Colorados history moving into the
summer months june july and august which
is the core of the western fire season
we were already starting with some very
dry conditions across most of the west
the global circulation patterns was
fairly neutral so we didn't have a clear
signal about what kind of weather
patterns we were going to see throughout
the summer what we ended up seeing
though was a very defined split between
very warm and dry conditions in the west
and very cool and wet conditions in the
east as we continued to move into the
summer we had some fires developing
across the southwest that while they
weren't
tremely large fires they were difficult
fires to deal with because of the
extremely dry fuel conditions there
meanwhile up in Alaska the same very
warm and dry conditions that were
affecting the western United States were
also affecting Alaska and very unusual
ways they were seeing near record
temperatures across a large portion of
the of the state that extended their
fire season from its usual July period
all the way into August but generally we
didn't have a lot of widespread fire
activity in june/july on june thirtieth
nineteen firefighters were killed on the
Yarnell Hill Fire they were members of
the Prescott Fire Department's Granite
Mountain hotshots this resulted in the
highest wildland firefighter death toll
since nineteen thirty three
as we got into August we were starting
to see a lot of fire across the
northwestern United States that while
the weren't tremendously big fires as
we'd seen in previous years they were
significant in that in some cases they
were threatening communities producing a
lot of smoke and and just generally
creating a significant fire problem over
a period of time as we got into mid to
late September significant amounts of
rainfall had occurred across the West
and we're quickly putting the fire
season to an end there were some very
dry conditions across California that we
have been monitoring all year but they
never had any significant weather events
that would drive a lot of fire until we
got into September the extremely dry
conditions down around the southern
parts of California led to the rim fire
which was a lot largest fire of the
season the rim fire started august
seventeenth near Yosemite National Park
this wildfire California's third largest
burned almost 260 thousand acres and was
contained on October 24th the end of the
season we only had just over 40,000
fires across the u.s. which is about
two-thirds of our normal and burned just
over 4 million acres which is just a
little bit more than half of what we
normally see in the typical fire season
a lot of this was largely due to the
fact that some of the interior fires the
Great Basin fires there a lot oftentimes
very large egg or fires didn't
materialize this year for a couple of
reasons the extended drought conditions
across the interior West while producing
very extreme fire conditions we did not
have the fuel loadings that typically
carries a lot of fire there another
factor was during a core of the fire
season june july and part of early
august we didn't have a lot of lightning
events in areas where we typically see a
lot of lightning starts we also didn't
see a lot of acreage and fires in the
southeast where we often get a lot of
fires but not a significant amount of
acres
although 2013 was a below average year
in terms of fires and acres burned it is
important to note as we move into the
2014 season that a slow season can be
just as hazardous as a busy one