Firefighters continue to battle a large blaze in southern California that started last week. At its most dangerous, the wildfire threatened about 4,000 homes and has moved quickly in the dry and windy conditions.
In Idaho, the National Interagency Fire Center predicts a slightly milder – but still above average – fire season.
“I don’t expect that we’ll see as much fire as we had last year and we’re probably not going to see the four, five, six hundred thousand acre grass fires that we saw last year," says predictive services manager Ed Delgado. "But we will see fires, and some of them will get pretty big.”
Massive blazes like the Mustang Complex and Trinity Ridge fires ate up hundreds of thousands of acres, and made 2012 one of the worst fire seasons on record. Delgado says Idaho’s early winter snowpack and cooler spring have kept fires at bay so far this year.
“But as we get into May and June we start to warm up and things dry out, we’ll start to see more fires," he says. "With a higher-than-normal probability of large fires across the mountains and foothills of California and into south-central Oregon. And then that will spread across the Northwest and into the Northern Rockies, including central Idaho later in the summer.”
He says very dry conditions in the West Central Mountains and the southwest corner of Idaho could be focal points during the latter part of the summer.
Copyright 2013 Boise State Public Radio
