USFS at Moran Meadows
Although a spot fire in the nearby Coal Creek drainage was suppressed yesterday, the U.S. Forest Service still has a fire incident team operating from Moran Meadows. Presumably, this is because it continues to offer a convenient helicopter landing zone.
The U.S. Forest Service is starting to get busy. They’ve now got a 3,000 acre blaze in the Bob, after a couple of fires merged, as well as several smaller actions elsewhere. According to the following article from the Daily Inter Lake, they did manage to suppress a small wildfire in the North Fork’s Coal Creek drainage yesterday. . .
A fire that rapidly expanded in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex has merged with another fire to the east to cover a total of 3,000 acres by Monday afternoon.
The Rapid Creek Fire first was sized up at less than acre at midday Sunday, but by the afternoon it had grown to 500 acres and by Monday morning it was estimated at 1,000 acres.
The fire is located on the east side of the wilderness about 27 miles west of Augusta. The fire has been churning through heavy, beetle-killed timber across the Flathead Forest’s boundary with the Lewis and Clark National Forest, where It burned into the 700-acre Elbow Pass Fire by Monday afternoon.
Well, the U.S. Forest Service had an incident team set up on Moran Meadow today, a short distance south of Polebridge. Reportedly, they were working with helicopter support (a shiny red one) to knock down a spot fire in the Coal Creek area. They appeared to be doing water drops.
So, it looks like its time to remind our loyal readership that this site has a Wildfire Information page, with links to a number of useful resources.
Also, the Daily Inter Lake, as in the past, is shaping up as the newspaper of record for wildfire news this year. You can read today’s report online, which centers on the situation in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.
Researchers are putting a lot of effort into studying the relationship between beetle killed and damaged tress and wildfire intensity . . .
Inside university laboratories and government research facilities across the country, scientists are playing with dozens of variables — mixing and matching and rearranging — to gain a better understanding of what makes wildfire go.
They’re busy building computer models as firefighters toil on steep mountainsides to put out more than a dozen new blazes in what has already become a vicious summer of destruction.
As temperatures rise and humidities drop, fire management officials are starting to get nervous abut fire conditions in Western Montana . . .
Western Montana seems to have misplaced its ticket to the bonfire season that’s torching the eastern half of the state, but fire officials remain braced for trouble over the Fourth of July week.
“We certainly came out of the chute pretty quick this year,” said Paula Short at the state Department of Natural Resources on Friday. “At least we’ve got all our large fires staffed with incident management teams now. With this early start, we’re expecting above-average temperatures and below-average humidity in the southeast and all along the bottom of the state.”
The fire response folks at Montana DNRC are hoping to introduce a little 21st Century tech this year by announcing wildfire developments via Twitter . . .
Fire response coordinators in Montana will use the social media website Twitter this year for the first time as a way to update residents of wildfire developments such as road closures and evacuation notices…
“The goal is to be able to provide updates, particularly on initial attacks or extended attacks, when it’s a fast-moving situation,” Grassy said.
The updates from the Twitter page @MTDNRCFIRE, will be another tool used by the state to update wildfires in addition to telephone alert systems that can target homes and cellphones in specific geographic regions and the fire information website InciWeb.
This is a bit like discussing the World Series after the first few games of the regular season but, for what it’s worth, there’s a chance we might have a mild fire season around here this year . . .
It looks to be a busy fire year, but not around here.
Continuing drought and poor snowpack have the nation’s southern states and large parts of the Midwest bracing for smoke and flames as spring moves into summer, according to Ed Delgado of the National Interagency Fire Center. Delgado heads the center’s National Predictive Services Program.
“One of the things we’re having to deal with is the uncertainty in global circulation patterns,” Delgado said during a national teleconference on Thursday. “Whether we transition into a neutral or an El Niño pattern will have dramatically different outcomes for the potential for fire.”
There’s a nice bit of money in the pot for fuels reduction work this year . . .
A deal between the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation and the North Fork Landowners Association will keep the North Fork buzzing with chainsaws this spring in an effort to reduce flammable fuels throughout the area.
According to forester Bill Swope, nearly two-thirds of the area along the North Fork Road, between Camas Creek and the Canadian border, have been scorched by wildfire since 1988. Now much of that is regrowing and he said efforts must be made to thin underbrush, which will be the focus of a $100,000 grant from DNRC.
The Daily Inter Lake has a pretty good report on current wildfire status in the region . . .
While fires burning in and around the Bob Marshall Wilderness are still listed as “active,” recent rains and cooler, longer nights have mostly put a lid on them.
From today’s Missoulian . . .
Federal and state wildland fire agencies will rescind Stage I fire restrictions on Wednesday throughout much of western Montana.
Included in the order are Flathead, Lake, Mineral, Sanders, Missoula, Powell, Ravalli, Granite, Deer Lodge and Silver Bow counties.
Restrictions will remain in effect on the Flathead Indian Reservation.