Are Raging Blazes in New Mexico, Colorado A Sign of What’s to Come This Fire Season?

A wall of smoke from the High Park fire blackens the sky. (Photo: Kimon Berlin/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Smoke blackened the sky over Fort Collins, Colorado Monday morning as residents left their homes to escape a wildfire burning out of control. Sparked by a lightening strike early Saturday morning, the High Park fire has already burned 41, 140 acres in the mountainous region of the state. With zero percent containment, the blaze doesn’t look like it will be stopping any time soon.

To the south, firefighters are continuing to combat New Mexico’s largest wildfire on record, which has burned 435 square miles of forest since mid-May.

These are just two early conflagrations in what experts predict will be another active wildfire season, following close on the heel’s of last year’s blaze-filled summer that saw record-setting fires in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. By the end of 2011, 74,126 fires had burned 8,711, 367 acres nationally, according to the National Interagency Coordination Center. While the number of fires was slightly lower than the 10-year average, the total of acres burned was significantly higher, coming to about 124 percent of the 10-year average.

Most at risk this year, according to the National Interagency Fire Center’s forecast, are portions of Arizona, western New Mexico stretching up to the Rocky Mountains and encompassing portions of western Colorado and south-central Wyoming. Other hotspots include southern California’s mountains, western Nevada, southeastern Oregon, southwest Idaho and parts of Texas. As far as the eastern half of the states are concerned, Florida and the coastal portion of the southeast states are at risk. The NIFC bases its predictions on fire history as well as weather patterns.

Wildfire Potential Outlook (Courtesy of the NIFC)

Wildfires in general are becoming more dangerous as people continue to build new houses on land known for these seasonal blazes. Fire doesn’t care about property lines; it’s more than happy to trespass. And even if people aren’t in the direct line of the fire, smoke can cause other problems.

Big, hard-to-control fires may occur more often, fueled by hotter, drier conditions caused by climate change and large quantities of woody debris in areas where fires have successfully been suppressed for years (See “The Perfect Firestorm”). In a recent study published in Ecosphere, researchers found that wildfires would most likely increase in the western United States. They used 16 different climate change models to create a comprehensive projection.

While wildfires have long been viewed as threats to be squashed quickly, they also play important ecological roles, renewing the land, and providing necessary minerals that plants need to grow and flourish. Animals can benefit from fire, too; the black-backed woodpecker, for instance, relies on wildfires to burn trees where they carve out nesting sites and scavenge for food.

Wildfires are a fact of life, and one that the federal government is aiming to better address. On June 7, the secretaries of the Department of the Interior and Agriculture released the latest iteration of their cohesive wildfire management strategy that will restore and maintain landscapes, help communities adapt for and respond to fire.

“It’s not going away,” USDA Under Secretary Harris Sherman said of the threat of wildfire in an interview with the AP. “We’re going to have to be more comprehensive and smarter in how we deal with these issues in the future.”

For more information on wildfires, visit http://www.nifc.gov/nicc/