Western Fires
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There was no competing with the force of flame this summer. An amazing 85,000 wildfires crackled across the nation and took over newspaper front pages for weeks. Severe fire weather which usually stays in the desert areasthis year moved in to the forested mountain regions and on to some well known sites. I'm Dave Thurlow for The Mount Washington Observatory and this is the Weather Notebook.

There is so much unpopulated land in the west. It would be nice to think that large wild fires could just ramble harmlessly across the landscape without bumping into anything. But when major wildfires hit two of the nation's nuclear sites--the Hanford reservation in Washington State and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as well as a couple national park facilities--you just have to wonder.

But of course fires don't have a design, they just respond to weather. Like with any bad fire season, the culprit this past season was drought. In this case, the dryness built up across the West for two years, thanks in part to the La Nia that began in 1998. A number of places from Washington down to Arizona got absolutely no rain this summer for one, two, or even three months. That's typical for the desert Southwest, but rare for the interior Northwest or the Rockies.

The few thunderstorms that popped up only made things worse because they produced lightning, but no rain. When the lightning-sparked fires subsided in October, they left behind almost seven million charred acres, about twice the usual amount. The nation spent almost a billion dollars to fight the fires, and some 30,000 firefighters were on the scene, responding ultimately to the weather.

Bob Henson wrote today's show, Sean Doucette engineered it, and it, along with every show we do, was made possible by the National Science Foundation.