Is the Fire Season Close to Over?

Wildfires throughout the Northwest have been going on for a couple of months now.

Ed Delgado of the National Interagency Fire Center doesn’t see any hope of them ending soon.

“We still have a lot of areas at risk particularly across the Northern Rockies and the Northwest. That will continue for at least the first half of September until we get a significant precipitation event with fronts as they start becoming more frequent across the region.”

The largest fire in Washington is the Diamond Creek Fire which was 105,000 acres as of Wednesday and in Oregon it’s the Chetco Bar Fire which is about 177,000 acres.

How did the fires get so bad? Jessica Gardetto of the NIFC says, “This extreme fire season is a combination of a lot of fuel loading. We had a very wet spring in most places so that caused even those finer fuels to grow quickly. Because we had such high temperatures for such an extreme amount of time starting off early in the summer, a lot of those fuels dried out and it’s been fire season in some of these states now for almost two months.”

More than 80 fires are burning in Washington, Oregon and Montana and there is nothing in the forecast over the next couple of weeks that would indicate significant cooling or potential rainfall.