Fire managers predict bad year for blazes

By Laura Zuckerman

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - U.S. fire managers are forecasting a grim year for blazes in drought-plagued Western states, just weeks after a premature start to the Southwest's wildfire season.

This comes even as the U.S. Forest Service, the lead agency for fighting fires on vast swaths of public and private lands, is reassessing a years-old model that sought to contain all blazes at all times.

Environmental and financial strains paired with demographic changes have made that strategy ineffective in an era of record-size fires sweeping across the West, experts say.

"We can't do things like we did in the 1970s and 1980s," said George Weldon, deputy director of fire, aviation and air for a regional Forest Service office in Montana. "The fire environment in a lot of situations is exceeding our capabilities to control large fires that burn the entire summer."

Climate models show a warming West where snowmelt from the mountains occurs earlier and dry conditions persist longer, setting the stage for blazes that reset measures for scale and intensity.

In 2006, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography released what scientists consider the definitive study on the link between global warming and worsening western wildfires, the same year the nation registered an all-time high of 9.8 million acres burned and the deaths of 24 wilderness firefighters.

Today, 43 percent of the Forest Service budget - $4.5 billion for this fiscal year - is funneled to its fire program, up from 18 percent in 2000.

That means the agency has less money for everything from recreation to range management, even as fire bosses become more selective about the blazes they will fight.