Before the rains, comes some heat

COEUR d’ALENE — It doesn’t take much.

A modest pile of dead grass and debris raked into a mound and set aflame can do it.

An uncovered burn barrel left alone for a minute or two can send sparks into dry grass. Bolstered by a gust of wind, it can result in a fire too large for a homeowner to knock down with a hose.

Shane O’Shea, fire warden at the Idaho Department of Lands, said scenarios like these have happened a lot already in the Mica supervisory area, which includes Coeur d’Alene and the Silver Valley.

Chasing burns this early in spring is an unusual beginning for the fire season, O’Shea said Friday.

“It is kind of counter intuitive,” he said.

His department has already responded to six local incidents. Two of them turned into wildfires that burned between a half acre and 3 acres.

“Usually this time of year we get calls on fires that may be a tenth of an acre, so it’s an anomaly for us,” he said.

The increase in fire calls and pending high temperatures prompted fire marshals, chiefs and wardens throughout the central Panhandle to raise the official fire danger Friday from low to moderate.

That means slash piles are prohibited, and anyone thinking about torching raked yard clippings, sticks and brush should be on alert.

“Every single fire we have had this year, they have all been due to escaped-debris burns,” O’Shea said.

The Department of Lands called in an incident management team — a crew of more than 100 firefighters and equipment to relieve local efforts — to fight a blaze that started in a logging slash pile and burned more than 350 acres between Sanders and Harvard northeast of Moscow.

The fire is expected to be fully snuffed this week.

“That is one of the earliest incident management team deployments we’ve had on a fire in North Idaho,” O’Shea said.

So far, May has been among the driest on record, said meteorologist Randy Mann. Only a handful of other times since 1895 — fewer than 10 times — has North Idaho recorded zero rain by mid May, Mann said. Usually temperatures hover in the 60s at this time of year, so when temperatures push into the 80s this weekend the unseasonable highs will be about 15 degrees above normal.

“It won’t be a record,” Mann said.

Record warmth was measured in 1949 when temperatures hit 90 degrees, he said.

The lack of rain and the quick jump in spring temperatures drying the soil and forest fuels prompted the Kootenai County Fire Prevention Co-op to take notice.

Craig Etherton, a Coeur d’Alene fire investigator and president of the cooperative, said raising the fire danger level from low to moderate is mostly a lesson in awareness for residents. No slash burning permits will be issued, but valid and active permits will be honored, and burn permits are still being made available. Anyone who burns must have a copy of the burn permit on hand.

If a fire gets out of hand, Etherton said, call the fire department before trying to fight the blaze.

“Don’t delay calling 911,” Etherton said. “People always try, try, try to put it out and they don’t call us and then it grows to 5 or 10 acres before we get a truck out there.”

Mann predicted that by the middle of next week, this year’s balmy and drier-than-usual May will revert back to something more seasonally average.

“Rain and falling temperatures,” he said. “And storms after that.”