Wednesday July 11 9:53 AM ET

Officials Predict Long, Hot Wildfire Season
By Michael Kahn

BOISE, Idaho (Reuters) - One year after the worst U.S. wildfire season in 50
years, scorching summer weather has again turned the western
United States into a tinderbox where a few sparks could easily ignite a new
inferno.

Officials at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, say bone-dry
conditions, coupled with thick underbrush, make for another
potential record-breaking fire season.

``We had a bad fire season last year and all the conditions are ripe for another
one,'' center spokesman Don Smurthwaite told Reuters during a
recent visit to the sprawling 55-acre complex on the outskirts of Idaho's
capital. ``Nature has cooked up the ingredients for a very busy fire season.''

Last season's firestorms scorched some 7.5 million acres -- an area roughly the
size of Maryland -- and cost some $1.7 billion to fight. What
government firefighters are asking now is, will lightning strike again?

It is no rhetorical question. A single summer storm can bring thousands of
``dry'' lightning strikes, bolts from the blue that can ignite quick-moving
wildfires across huge swathes of land, said Larry Hamilton, director of the
Bureau and Land Management's National Office of Fire and Aviation.

``This year is very similar to last year and some areas are even drier,'' he
said. ``The unknown factor is what kind of dry lightning we will have.''

The fire center -- more than 20 nondescript government buildings -- plays a
crucial role in preventing and fighting wildfires on close to 700 million
acres of public land, most in the western United States.

FIGHTING FIRES 'NOT A GUESSING GAME ANYMORE'

Comprised of seven government agencies with 500 employees, the fire center was
established in 1963 to better coordinate firefighting efforts among
different entities such as the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land
Management. Interagency cooperation is vital during peak fire season,
when officials scramble to spread limited firefighting resources across a huge
territory under the jurisdiction of different agencies.

``Firefighters used to drive all night to a fire and then find out it was
actually 200 miles to the south,'' said Jack Sept, the center director of
external
affairs. ``But it's not a guessing game anymore; we pretty much know where they
are going to be.''

The close working relationship becomes clear during the morning briefing, when
representatives from different agencies come together to chart
firefighting efforts. During a 15-minute meeting, a meteorologist gives a
weather forecast and a center official has an update on numbers of firefighters
and supplies that have been sent to uncontained fires in Alaska and Nevada.

These briefings, which occur once a day during fire season and become even more
frequent when the blazes really get going, help officials keep
abreast of the fires and where firefighters and equipment are most badly needed,
Smurthwaite said.

The center, which covers five time zones, cranks up to 24 hours a day when the
wildfire situation becomes as critical as it did last summer, when
some 28,000 firefighters were called in to battle blazes, he added. ``That's
when the situation is so volatile it can change in a couple of hours,'' he said.

OFF TO A HOT START

While officials have not yet moved to that level of vigilance, a few major fires
in the West have provided a possible prelude to what could be a long,
hot summer.

In June a blaze ignited in Nevada, burning 14,500 acres just outside the
gambling city of Reno. A pair of wildfires in Alaska scorched about 193,000
acres before firefighters gained the upper hand.

But one encouraging sign this year is that fires are confined to the West. The
problem last year was that the season did not migrate from the South to
the West as it usually does. Instead, blazes burned out of control through most
of the country all summer, stretching resources dangerously thin as
officials called in experts from abroad and the U.S. military to battle fires
from Florida to Washington state.

This summer, officials at the fire center have a bigger fire-fighting budget,
thanks to an additional $1.8 billion from the former Clinton administration that

will help fund more firefighters and aircraft. But those extra resources will
not be immediately available because it takes time to recruit and train people
and to order specially made fire-fighting equipment, Hamilton said.

``The thing we keep cautioning people is that it doesn't all come on line this
year,'' he said. ``You just can't go out and buy 40 new custom-made fire
trucks.''

Officials also hope to cut this year's fire risk by carrying out a ``prescribed
burn'' program on 3.2 million acres of federal land to clear the dead trees
and underbrush that makes wildfires burn quicker and hotter. That represents a
significant shift from traditional government firefighting policy, which
over the last decade has concentrated on stamping out blazes as soon as they
started.

Critics say that policy actually interrupted the natural role wildfires play in
reducing the overgrown fuels in the forest that spawned the kind of huge
blazes seen last summer.

``The goal is to reduce the fuels to put the ecosystem back in balance,'' the
Bureau of Land Management's Hamilton said.