Dry leaves and downed trees, such as the ones pictured here in the lower Rattlesnake area, could add extra fuel to fires this summer. (Greg Lindstrom/Montana Kaimin)

Fueling the fire: Commemorating and awaiting the ‘Big Burn’

by Will Melton | March 17, 2010 | Montana Kaimin

On Aug. 19, 1910, the Northwest was ablaze.

The winter had been fairly wet, but by April, the taps had turned off. Spring and summer saw a prolonged dry spell that preceded an August with the least precipitation of any month recorded.

Railroads were massive fire spreaders, with coal- and wood-burning engines throwing embers to spark fire-hungry weeds and grasses that lined the rails.
In early July, fires started popping up. By mid-August, fires spread up and down the Northern Rockies. Crews were exhausted and tapped out, just trying to keep up.

Then, on Aug. 20, the winds came.

Over the next two days, 3 million acres in Idaho and Montana burned, consuming firefighters, logging and mining camps and towns. By Aug. 23, the fires had burned an area nearly the size of Connecticut, making it the largest in recorded U.S. history.

This summer, western Montana and northern Idaho will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the “Big Burn” with conferences and museum exhibits. At the same time, fire professionals around the region are considering the possibility of an equally big event in the years to come.

University of Montana professor Ronald Wakimoto, who has studied wildland fire behavior for 34 years, says “the gun is pointed at us in the Northern Rockies” due to longer fire seasons caused by global warming.

He and other specialists stress that there are too many variables to know if such a major event could happen again, but they all predict high fire activity for the 2010 season.

This year, the weather is off to a bad start. Snowpack for the Missoula area sits at 51 percent of average. The mountains of northern Idaho aren’t doing much better. The long-term forecast shows the region with below-average precipitation and above-average temperatures through at least September.

Patti Koppenol, the director of fire, aviation and air management for the Forest Service’s Northern Rockies Coordinating Group, stressed that snowpack is not necessarily a strong predictor of an active fire season and people can’t know what a season will look like until later in the year. The standard line for fire scientists is, “Come see me in June.”

Carl Seielstad, the interim director of fire management for the National Center for Landscape Fire Analysis at the University of Montana, pointed out that in western Montana, the wettest months are May and June. So until Montana’s wet season has passed, neither he nor any other fire predictors are willing to make any definitive predictions.

That said, he and Wakimoto both agree that this year’s forecast doesn’t look good.

Seielstad also said there hasn’t been a major dry wind event in the region in decades. He said the 2003 fires, which were considered major, were set up almost exactly like the 1910 fires before the wind came. But the weather cooperated, and the fires were eventually contained. There is no way of knowing, he said, when that kind of fluke wind will come again.

By 1910, federal forest management had existed in some form for more than 30 years, but the Forest Service had been around for only five of those years. It was ill-prepared for a large fire, employing few men in the sparsely populated forests of the West.

Once the fires overwhelmed the few professional firefighters, forest managers called on roughnecks working in nearby mining and logging camps to try and halt the spread of the flames.

Because the fires were so massive and the crews so small, these amateurs were quickly overwhelmed. Many small towns were completely destroyed and 87 people died, among them 78 firefighters. Even larger towns, such as Wallace, Idaho, suffered major damage. A thousand refugees fled into Missoula, with more heading west to Spokane, Wash.

Professionals still worry today about a lack of manpower to fight fires in the Northern Rockies. Chief Bill Colwell of the Missoula Rural Fire Department said that, because his funding comes primarily from property taxes, he is limited in the preparations he can make.

So long as the fires remain minor, Colwell says, his department will do the best it can with the people it has.

Koppenol doesn’t worry about a lack of manpower. The Forest Service has the ability to rush resources to a major fire.

“In 1910, they weren’t bringing people from Florida … from Australia,” Koppenol said.

Koppenol was guardedly optimistic about the odds of preventing a major fire. She said the Forest Service has fire modeling and predictive tools to help divert resources to areas that are most likely to need them.

Colwell agreed, to a degree. He said that even if they aren’t able to battle back a massive fire, they should at least have the ability to divert fires from major population centers. The problem these days, Colwell said, is the number of houses spread throughout the woods. Fire crews will work to save such houses, Colwell said, but in case of a major fire event, the only thing they can do is make sure there is an effective evacuation plan.

The 1910 Big Burn was doused when a cold front blew in, bringing rain and effectively ending the season. Firefighters call a rainstorm that ends the fire season the “August singularity.”

Unfortunately, a new study by Seielstad and Ann-Marie Hadlow, a graduate student at UM, to be published this spring shows that since 1982, the August singularity has been pushed back 15.5 days in Montana, on average.

This extension of the season, if it continues, bodes poorly for the future of fire suppression in the West. A longer season means more fires and a greater possibility that such fires will blow up into the next big burn.

There is no way of knowing whether 2010 is the year this will happen, but Colwell said no matter what happens this season, there is still a lot of fuel in the forests just waiting to burn, and when it does, “it has potential to be amazing.”

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