A week after lightning sparked it, a 15,000-acre wildfire is still burning through the Fishlake National Forest. Another wildfire is raging near the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
And fire restrictions went into place across Central Utah on Friday on federal, unincorporated private and state lands in Millard, Sevier, Wayne, Piute, Garfield, Juab and Beaver counties.
“Fire danger is rapidly increasing daily in central Utah,” said Josh Tibbetts, fire management officer for the Color Country District of the Bureau of Land Management, in a statement. “Recent wildfires have grown rapidly on windy days and have the potential to threaten our communities and public lands.”
Wildfire season is officially here and the hot, dry weather Utahns faced this week has elevated wildfire risk across the state.
“We have above average fire potential for July, August and September for the northwestern part of Utah,” said Basil Newmerzhycky, lead meteorologist with Predictive Services at the Great Basin Coordination Center. The same is true for much of Southern Utah.
The last 18 to 24 months of wet winters and summer monsoons led to “an above normal grass crop,” Newmerzhycky explained. Now the heat wave is drying out that grass.
How many wildfires will hit Utah this summer?
“Forecasting acreage burns is a hard thing to do,” said Jim Lutz, wildland resources professor at Utah State University’s Quinney College of Natural Resources, “because forests can be ready to burn for a really long time.”
When exactly they’ll spark — either from lightning or human causes — is unpredictable. “It’s the long periods of hot weather like we’re having right now that dry out those fuels and make them more likely to spread if they’re ignited,” Lutz said.
According to the Utah Northern Interagency Fire Center, most of Utah is at moderate risk of large fires right now. The most southern part of the state has an elevated risk from lightning and dry fuels.
“If we get really hot weather for a few weeks and then some windy days, any place in the state can burn,” Lutz said.
Silver linings: topography and fuels reduction
Luckily, Utah’s peaks and valleys topography makes megafires that burn 100,000 acres rare. In the last 40 years, there hasn’t been a single one, according to Lutz. Medium fires that burn 10,000 acres — like the one burning in Fishlake National Forest — are more common.
Fire is “a natural part of the West,” Lutz said. “We can sort of choose when and where the fire is going to happen, but we can’t prevent fire.”
Utah forests need a larger number of small fires that clean up forest fuels. Utah’s Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands is working to set prescribe burns and remove vegetation, sometimes by hand, explained Jennifer McBride, coordinator of the Statewide Fire Wildland Urban Interface Program.
“There’s a lot of money being put into the fire mitigation and trying to stop fires or lessen the fire hazard before these big fire seasons hit,” McBride said.
The state sets aside funds for wildland urban interface prevention and preparedness and mitigation, and also has bid for national community wildfire defense grants.
When it comes to wildfire mitigation, “there’s so much work that needs to be done,” McBride said, although she added, “we’ve made a lot of progress across the state.”
She hopes that work will become apparent in parts of the state where fires are currently burning.
“Hopefully,” McBride said, “some of our fuels work that’s been done is going to save some areas that these fires might hit.”