Scientists sorting out beetle-fire relationship
By SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN Associated Press The Associated Press
Sunday, July 1, 2012 11:31 AM EDT
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Inside university laboratories and government research facilities across the country, scientists are playing with dozens of variables — mixing and matching and rearranging — to gain a better understanding of what makes wildfire go.
They're busy building computer models as firefighters toil on steep mountainsides to put out more than a dozen new blazes in what has already become a vicious summer of destruction.
Colorado is having its worst fire season in a decade, while New Mexico is recovering from two record fires — one that charred more than 465 square miles and another that destroyed more than 240 homes.
The experts all agree: The dry conditions and strong winds are driving this year's super fires.
So what happens when researchers add to their formulas the devastation caused during the last 15 years by an epidemic of hungry bark beetles? The tiny insects have turned more than 40 million acres of the nation's forests into an unsightly patchwork of red and gray death.
"We've always had bark beetle infestations, but we've never had anything that's been so widespread and spread so quickly," said Tom Tidwell, chief of the U.S. Forest Service. "The only place it's really starting to slow down is just where we're starting to run out of trees."
From Colorado's resort towns of Vail and Aspen to mountain communities in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, local leaders are worried about fires burning hotter and faster due to the beetle kill.
Some of this year's fires have already burned through areas affected by the native insects, but fire behavior analysts and researchers say the result isn't always a hotter, more severe fire. Sometimes it is.
With the ingredients of topography, fuels and weather always changing, the beetle effect comes partly down to timing. Then there's the species of beetle (there are 15 in the West), the type of trees being attacked and the intensity and rate of tree mortality.
"It just isn't anything that's straight forward," Tidwell said.
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