Fire season remains active

Don’t let what has been a slow fire year turn into a late intense one.

The local 2019 wildland fire season has been a relatively quiet one, and local officials would like to see it kept that way through the final stages of what is normally fire season in these parts.

“There is still a chance for fires, the forecast calls for hotter and drier conditions through the rest of the week,” Plains/Thompson Falls Ranger District Fire Management Officer Scott Schrenk said Monday, “and we have had a lot of human-caused fires this summer.

“With the fair coming up this week and all the people in town for that, the risk for more human-caused fires also rises,” he added, “and we always seem to have fire activity on the fair weekend.”

Schrenk said that an unusually high percentage of fires this year have been caused by careless humans, and that he would like to see that trend end.

The only two wildland fires discovered in Sanders County last week were human-caused fires; the Cow fire which burned 11 acres in the Sears Gulch area north of Plains, and the Leufkens fire east of Thompson Falls which burned six-tenths of an acre near the Airport Road Sunday evening.

Montana DNRC and U.S. Forest Service firefighters responded to the Cow fire the night of Aug. 21 while Thompson Falls Rural Fire Department and Forest Service forces attacked the Leufkens fire the evening of Aug. 25.

Under Montana DNRC jurisdiction, the Cow fire of undetermined origin is now in partol status.

Under U.S. Forest Service jurisdiction, the Leufkens fire was human-caused, but the exact origin has not been determined. It too, was in patrol status as of early this week.

Whenever a report of a wildland fire in Sanders County is heard, be sure to visit the Sanders County Wildland Fire Information page on Facebook for all the details.

In addition to the latest local wildfire news, that Sanders County page is also being used to announce and detail prescribed burning projects in the area.