2019 fire season transitions to prescribed burning

The 2019 fire season has come to a close. There were 142 wildfires suppressed in west central Montana. In our communities, 2019 will be remembered as a welcome respite from wildfire smoke. Wildfire conditions in Idaho, Oregon and Washington were much like ours, so smoke wasn't drifting in from the west as it has in recent years. Even though there was a typical number of wildfire starts, live fuel moistures were high most of the summer due to intermittent wetting rains. Live fuel moistures in the high country was a key factor in keeping wildfires small, facilitating success at initial attack.

Cool, wet weather has arrived. Federal, tribal, state and local government fire personnel have now turned their attention to implementing prescribed fire projects in the area.

Fire personnel have been burning thousands of hand piles, created on the landscape to clear the forest floor of dead fuel. National Forests and the BLM have been broadcast burning (burning timbered and grass/brush areas that are where dead and down fuels are not piled) to take advantage of favorable weather windows facilitating fire use at low and moderate intensities.

These burns are reflective of what Lewis and Clark encountered on their epic journey two centuries ago. Their journals describe a landscape covered in low and moderate intensity fires. Most were the result of lightning strikes, but some were the result of indigenous people lighting fires in the fall to create better conditions for grazing animals in the spring. The Salish and Kootenai tribes actually had people designated as fire starters. When their fall camps were broken down, fires were lit behind them as they transitioned to their winter camps.

It's important to know that broadcast burns are critical for forest health and they couldn't be implemented on the kind of scale that is needed if conditions weren't favorable. If forest conditions are crowded with ladder fuel and tight canopies, fire on the surface transitions to the canopy at lower intensities, making broadcast burning impractical. Most broadcast burning takes place on dry slopes with southerly aspects where ponderosa pine and western larch dominate.

On other slopes, mechanical treatments are necessary to create conditions favorable to broadcast burning. In either case, forest health projects like these, when burned under prescribed conditions, produce five times less smoke than wildfires. Communities were impacted by wildfire smoke in 2017 for over 70 days; very few communities were even aware of burns that took place in late August on high elevation sites in Idaho forests this year when hundreds of acres were underburned.

Your neighbors, employees of MCFPA member agencies that have wildland suppression and fire management responsibilities, are appreciative of the muted impact of wildfire in 2019 just as you have. They also welcomed the opportunity to use fire in its historic, natural, necessary role in ecosystem management. We thank you for your support.