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From spark to finish: Americans from Florida to Montana are taking stock of fire losses By PETER SALTER, PERRY BACKUS, MARTIN J. KIDSTON and RON SEELY Special to The Gazette A park ranger found the flames 13 hours into the new year, a thin curtain of smoke rising near a rural Florida crossroads.
Ten months later, few people remember the year’s first wildfire. At 1 p.m. on Jan. 1, an ATV buzzing through the Picayune Strand State Forest probably ignited a grassy ditch. A two-man crew smothered the blaze in 36 minutes and stunted its growth at a mere two-tenths of an acre. But those early flames kindled the start of an exhausting and expensive year for residents, firefighters and federal officials. From its modest start, the 2000 fire season gained momentum as the months wore on and fed on tinder-like conditions across the nation.
By late September, the season had scorched millions of acres, leveled hundreds of homes and hastened 16 funerals. It challenged tens of thousands of firefighters, including crews from Mexico, Canada and Australia. And it ’s still threatening several states. “I think the general feeling is we’re getting closer to the end,” said Lorraine Buck, a Bureau of Land Management official based at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. “But we aren’t really letting down our guard because fire is just too unpredictable to do that.” Already, this year’s wildfire season has burned hot and long enough to sear itself into record books – and to leave lasting scars on the country’s consciousness.
The tollThis year’s fires have devoured land at a pace that’s close to matching the biggest fire years of the last four decades. As of Sept. 25, nearly 80,000 fires had darkened 6.9 million acres – an area slightly larger than New Jersey, three times the size of Yellowstone National Park and the equivalent of 5.3 million football fields.This year’s fire season isn’t over yet, but it already has burned more than twice the ground of an average fire season in the 1990s. The 2000 fire season seems likely to claim 7 million acres, something that’s happened just twice before in the last 40 years – in 1998 and 1963. The 2000 blazes frustrated firefighters by erupting in the wrong places at the wrong times. Most years, experts let the calendar tell them where to send the most troops. This year, Buck said, that natural rhythm “was out of whack.” The fire season is on track to ring up record firefighting costs. As of mid-September, federal agencies spent about $825 million battling flames – a figure that doesn’t include property damage. By comparison, federal spending for fire suppression last year totaled $523 million, and officials expect 2000 spending to surpass 1994’s total of $845line million. Several high-drama, high-profile firestorms fueled the fire season. In New Mexico, for instance, a blaze set by firefighters – an act of preventive forest maintenance designed to burn 900 acres of brush – turned on the town of Los Alamos and torched 239 homes. In Washington state, a fatal car wreck ignited a 192,000-acre fire that threatened a nuclear-waste graveyard. From Florida to eastern Washington state, from northern Minnesota to southern California, where the fire season seems likely to end, 2000 was the year when millions of Americans were united by the fear of wildfire. And, in areas where fire became more than a fear, residents shared even more: the sense of battle fatigue, the hazy skies, the despair, the dark ashes.
Early warning, early firesOfficials knew trouble was coming. They just didn’t know how much.A series of warmer, shorter winters followed by hot, dry summers had wrung too much moisture from the grass, brush and timber that wildfires need for fuel. “Our meteorologists were talking about this phenomenon very early in the season,” said Buck, of the BLM. “But we had no way of predicting the magnitude.” The season’s first serious strikes hit Florida, where officials had expected severely dry conditions, but those were joined by low humidity and strong winds. Gerry LaCavera, a Florida wildfire-mitigation specialist said, “Those three factors ... made it a horrific season.” For 23 years, Kelly Kaminski has lived in a forested area near Homestead, Fla., not far from the Everglades. He’s accustomed to dry seasons and fires, but he wasn’t ready for this season. When Kaminski left for work the morning of April 5, his neighborhood was hazy with smoke. When he returned that afternoon, he was homeless. “I pulled in my driveway, and my house was like 24 inches tall,” he said. “It had burned right down to the ground. I drove up to my home, and it was gone .... “Then I was standing alone in a pile of ashes without any money even to go to a hotel.” Kaminski’s family was safe – his wife was in California and his daughters at college. But the family’s dog and cats perished in the fire, and the family’s possessions were destroyed. Three days later, in the same state park that hosted the tiny Jan. 1 blaze, a youngster was burning trash when an aerosol can exploded, spraying fire into nearby trees, LaCavera said. In its eight-day run, the Merritt Fire consumed more than 16,000 acres and destroyed four homes and two mobile homes.
‘Just nothing left’Despite the warnings – and despite the early Florida flare-ups – it took the near-destruction of a town to catch the country’s attention.On May 4, crews from the Bandelier National Monument ignited what was supposed to be a 900-acre controlled fire on Cerro Grande, an obscure peak in the Jemez Mountains. They wanted the fire to creep along a hillside for five or six days to clear brush. Instead, dry conditions and unexpected winds drove the fire across the mountain range and toward the town of Los Alamos. Genevieve Barrett had just returned from a run when she spotted the smoke trail, still miles away. The Los Alamos resident had heard tinder-dry sticks snapping under her feet and wondered why anyone would start a fire in those conditions. In days, Barrett watched the sky turn orange as flames advanced. She was forced to leave in a rush during a mandatory evacuation. And she learned that her home was one of 239 burned to the ground. “I started crying,” she said. “There was just nothing left.” Kelly Carpenter, the town’ s community-development director, said, “It was awful and painful, and it will take a long time for the people of Los Alamos to recover from it.” By the time it was over, the fire became the biggest in New Mexico’s history. It blackened nearly 80 square miles and burned an estimated 37 million trees. More than 400 families were homeless. The blaze also threatened the Los Alamos National Laboratory, prompting fears that the birthplace of the atomic bomb would release radioactive contamination.
Fire in the mountainsIn mid-September, Priscilla Hammon looked back at what the 2000 fire season wasn’t.“It’s not the deadliest. It’s not the largest loss of vegetation and trees. It’ s not the largest loss of homes and structures,” said Hammon, spokeswoman for the National Interagency Fire Center. “But it’s more climactic than other years.” Which means, she said, more fires were burning at once, requiring the attention of more firefighters in more places at the same time. This was a new move in the traditional dance of the fire season. Typically, it starts early, with blazes in the South and East. When rains calm those areas, fires are already shifting toward the Southwest. By the time those regions get relief from a late-summer monsoon season, fires are migrating north, toward Colorado, the Rocky Mountains, the Northwest and, finally, California, Buck said.
Instead of keeping step with the season during its normal cross-country routine, firefighters were forced to shuffle and stretch. “It actually started out in a fairly normal fashion ... but then it didn’t stop,” Buck said. “This year was unusual. We still had fires burning throughout all of those areas for a prolonged time.” This year’s scramble to simply keep pace with new fires became apparent in July, when blazes struck the northern Rockies. In Idaho and Montana, fires didn’t discriminate. They burned rolling grasslands, high-mountain deserts and populated valleys. Conditions were ripe for trouble: Rain was scarce, temperatures soared, humidity fell and hot, erratic winds and lightning pounded the two states. Throughout the region, the ground was dry, and nearly everything served as a match capable of starting fires – lightning, downed power lines, chainsaws, campfires, off-road vehicles, even auto accidents. A fireworks display at a hot-air balloon festival near Billings triggered a 50-acre fire on July 25 that caused $25,000 worth of damage to a barley field in a matter of minutes. By July 23, the Bucksnort and Cave Gulch fires had erupted in the urban fringes just east of Helena near Canyon Ferry Lake, while, in southeastern Montana, the town of Ashland was already in the shadow of the Fort Howes fire, a 44,000-acre beast. On July 28, nearly 50 new starts were ignited by one storm. By the end of the month, Montana was ablaze from east to west – and Idaho was no better off, with 1,000 firefighters battling the 77,000-acre Clear Creek blaze in the backcountry. Smoke choked the city of Salmon, Idaho, for most of the summer. Fire camps swelled into small cities, and public land was closed. The restrictions came at the peak season for outfitters, hikers and recreationists – and they marked the beginning of the end for summer outdoor activities. Smoke-filled skies prompted air alerts; low rivers limited fishing. Officials identified a troubling pattern emerging from the fires, which were lined up north-south through Montana and Idaho, said Judith Dyess, a fire-information officer. “It set up the potential for a more devastating fire season because you had winds from the west,” she said. “You had this really long front that could start gobbling things up.” In the Bitterroot Valley, infrared aerial photos revealed a mosaic of fires, and Ravalli County officials moved to pass an emergency levy to help pay for increasing firefighting costs. Hundreds of homes were evacuated; dozens were destroyed. A swarm of new fires that broke out Aug. 3 brought the valley’s total to nearly 60. And, even as new blazes broke out, existing fires grew into each other. “A lot of these fires have burned together,” said Bob Summerfield, a fire-information officer, at the time. “The Burke Fire has burned into the Bear Fire, has burned into the Spade Fire, has burned into the Gilbert Fire, has burned into the Maynard Fire. They’re all connected.” By Aug. 14, fires in the scenic valley had scarred more than 120,000 acres. Statewide, the total was estimated at 375,000 acres. When tension finally eased in the Bitterroot, other parts of Montana were just heating up. On Aug. 16, a blaze near Townsend took over the spotlight. A spark created during the harvest of a grain field was fanned by 30-mph winds. Within 24 hours, the fire – dubbed the Toston-Maudlow blaze – grew to 14,000 acres and forced the evacuation of 40 residents. Three days after it started, the runaway blaze was estimated at 100,000 acres. By mid-September, the change of seasons ushered in relief. Rain fell. Nights turned cold. Frost appeared in the high country, and morning dew clung to windows in the valleys. Most of the pressure was off, most of the fires were snuffed and Montanans started taking stock. Their state had been the temporary home to 12,000 firefighters, who battled nearly 2,400 fires. Nearly a million acres had burned. Despite that loss, there was still a widespread sense that the fire season in Montana could have been much worse. For the first time in weeks, the national spotlight shifted away from Montana, as big fires erupted in Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas.
Still a threatEven before the dawn of this year’s fire season, northern Minnesotans were living in fear of wildfire – the same kind of fear residents of California are feeling as the season comes to an end.On the fringes of Minnesota’s 1.1-million acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, lodge owners and residents spent the summer sitting atop a tinder keg. On July 4, 1999, the skies darkened and the winds rose. In less than an hour, gusts up to 100 mph flattened trees on more than 400,000 acres – more trees than were knocked down by the explosion that blew off the top of Mount St. Helens. The area was gripped by the threat of a fire, a fire that experts predicted could burn hundreds of thousands of acres and threaten homes, lodges and towns. Paddlers told stories of finding piles of downed trees 30 feet high. Forest officials estimated as much as 80 to 150 tons of fuel per acre littered parts of the blowdown area. Then summer rains dampened the dry fuel. The big fire never came. Residents began bracing for the next year. California residents are still waiting to see what the rest of this year delivers. Every fall, the Santa Ana winds start their journey from the desert to the sea. By then, the brush species clumped under the name of chaparral have dried under the California sun, signaling the start of the wildfire season. “If you consider our live fuel moisture levels, we’re probably a month ahead this year,” said Ken Pimlott, of California’s Department of Forestry. “We’re definitely dry, but this isn’t the driest year we’ve ever had.” There’s nothing unusual about fire conditions hovering around the critical mark in California. The California Department of Forestry’ s command center in Perris handled about 80,000 emergency calls last year. About 10 percent of those were fire-related. California uses inmate labor to fight wildfires. About 50 camps are scattered throughout the state. Most hold between 80 and 120 inmates, who do a variety of community-service work when not on fire lines. This time of year, wildfire calls are an almost-daily occurrence. As cooler weather moves into the Northern Hemisphere, the 2000 fire season that started in a Florida ditch – and raged in so many parts of the United States – could end the width of the nation away, in the brush-covered hillsides east of Los Angeles. Peter Salter is an editor at the Lincoln Journal Star in Lincoln, Neb. Perry Backus is a reporter for the Montana Standard in Butte. Martin Kidston is a reporter for the Helena Independent Record. Ron Seely is a reporter at the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison.
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