DENVER—Snow storms in late 2006 and early 2007 that paralyzed Colorado’s eastern plains and forced farmers to drop hay bales from helicopters for snowbound cattle are now contributing to what could be an above-average fire season.
Forecasters with the Rocky Mountain Area Predictive Services said tall stalks of grasses that grew with the extra moisture from those storms are now dead across thousands of acres from Colorado’s foothills east of the Continental Divide to western Kansas and Nebraska.
Those grasses die and are normally replaced by new grass, but cold, dry weather this year has prevented the annual “green-up” and left the dead stalks towering over the new grass.
“All that snowpack (from 2006-07) melted and was absorbed into the soils and we got a lot of grasses from it,” said Tim Mathewson, a forecaster at the Rocky Mountain Coordination Center. “It has become a factor this spring and will become a factor the remainder of the spring.”
The danger for the area will remain high between May and August, and may lessen when late summer wet patterns called monsoons move into the area.
A La Nina weather pattern through the summer is expected to bring dry, windy weather across most of the forecast area that covers Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming. That could increase the fire danger for late summer.
Mathewson said the abundance of dry grass creates the potential for extreme fire behavior of the kind seen in wildfires that scorched at least 17,600 acres in Colorado earlier this month.
An aerial tanker pilot died April 15 battling an 8,700-acre wildfire at the Fort Carson Army post near Colorado Springs, while the same day an 8,900-acre wildfire started that destroyed eight homes near and in Ordway, a farm town on the eastern plains. Two volunteer firefighters died while en route to the quick-moving blaze.
At higher elevations, above-average snowpack is expected to help delay the start of the fire season.
“Of course, a month of rain changes everything,” said U.S. Forest Service spokesman David Steinke.
