USFS: Fire season is moderate

SANDPOINT — Despite enduring a handful of impressive lightning storms, this summer’s fire season is shaping up to be average at worst.

U.S. Forest Service fire management officer Dave Lux said his crews have been busy fending off small fires all summer, but haven’t faced anything close to being a catastrophic fire event.

“It’s been below average for North Idaho, for sure,” he said.

Reports from other fire agencies are similar, and Shawn Hicks of Idaho Department of Lands said most of this year’s fires have been easily contained. Hicks said his team has dealt with 48 fires this season, with the largest eating up 15 acres near Athol. This week’s lighting storm sparked two small fires in the area, but neither are larger than a tenth of an acre and both are well contained, Hicks said.

While there have been no major fires, there have been plenty of small fires that, if not for diligent work from fire crews, could have become serious, he said.

“We had a number of those storms where we’d get thousands of lighting strikes in our area, and we got stretched pretty thin a couple of times,” he said.

The summer’s most impressive storm came in late July and rained down more than 3,000 lighting strikes locally, but even that event didn’t produce any sizable fires, Lux said.

Lightening storms generally begin to subside in mid-September, and Lux said the cooler, wetter weather over the horizon makes any major lightning-caused fires unlikely in the near future.

It is not entirely uncommon to see fires burning well into October, but unless something unforeseen happens, both Lux and Hicks say the summer of 2009 will be remembered for being fairly uneventful.