Down, but not out

JUST IN CASE YOU THOUGHT THE FIRE IS OUT

Because of the extremely dry conditions it will take a series of significant rain events to declare the fire out.  Fine fuels react quickly to humidity in the air so it doesn’t take much time for them to dry out (a few days with sun on them) for them to become receptive to fire.  Large fuels (logs, stumps, etc) take a long period time to both dry out and moisten up.  Because of the historically very dry fall these large fuel are very dry.  If they are on fire now they may continue to smolder during the rain event and come alive when it dries out and catch leaf litter on fire.

At this point fire managers are reluctant to say the fire is out or we are out of fire season.  We’ll just have to wait to see what the weather brings us.

THAT FROM THE US FOREST SERVICE