The summer’s wildfire season in Utah is expected to tally more fires and more acreage burned than in the previous two years — but what surprised officials was how many fires were caused by human activity.
Officials from the state’s Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands and the federal Bureau of Land Management said they knew as the season started that the state would see more fires than were seen in 2023 and 2024, because of dry summer conditions following a dry winter.
Heavy snows during the winters of 2023 and 2024, meant more vegetation this year, said Kayli Guild, the forestry division’s communications director. With little precipitation this spring and summer, that vegetation dried quickly — which, she said, spiked the possibility of fires in central and southern Utah.
“It’s usually within two years after years with snow that we really see a significant increase in wildfire behavior and activity,” Guild said. “We have extra vegetation and extremely dry conditions.”
In April, Guild said, the Great Basin Coordination Center — a government agency that monitors, predicts and studies fire behaviors in Utah, Nevada, Idaho and parts of Wyoming — shared outlooks that confirmed that more fires were likely across Utah. The center provides information to state agencies at the start of every fire season and the beginning of each month.
Gina Palma, the center’s woodland fire meteorologist, said the agency expected “above normal fire potential” in higher elevations in central and southern Utah and “normal fire potential” in the rest of the state, based on the center’s fire outlook reports from April and May.
Palma added that even though this year’s fire season was “above the median” in terms of affected land, it fell just below the 20-year average.
The most area burned in a year in the last 20 years, Palma wrote in an email, was 629,212 acres in 2007. Other big years: 2020, when 329,164 acres burned; 2018, when 438,983 acres burned; 2017, with 249,829 acres burned; and 2012, when 415,308 acres burned.
BLM spokesperson Blake Johnson agreed that this season’s fires were the product of perfect conditions: drier conditions, drier fuel and a drier winter.
“When all the conditions come together to start a fire and to spread it, it’s this concept we call ‘alignment,’ Johnson said. “We look at the ‘fire triangle’ — three things that need to be present for a fire to start: heat, fuel and air.”
What these agencies could not predict was the number of human-caused fires.
As of Tuesday, there were 910 fires recorded in Utah this year, burning up 163,455 acres. Of those 910 fires, 224 were started naturally, and another 89 had unknown causes. That left 597 fires — 65.6%, nearly two-thirds — caused by human activity.
Just last week, out of 84 new fires, 22 were human-caused. The main cause, according to FFSL spokesperson Kelley Wickens, are vehicles.
“That can be … a car along the freeway blowing a tire, causing sparks … or it can be a mechanical issue. It can be a car parked in grass,“ Wickens said.
Guild added that when she looked at last week’s numbers, out of the human-caused fires the agency tracked, 149 were vehicle-related.
Among the most common vehicle-related causes, Guild said, are “flat tires, wheel bearings on trailers, people dragging chains, or people towing something not knowing that their vehicle is not capable of doing and that overheats and then we have a fire that way. Brakes and catalytic converters are also problems that we’ve seen.”
The state’s Division of Emergency Management, on its Be Ready Utah website, has partnered with the Department of Public Safety to create a wildfire preparedness portal to prepare Utahns for fire situations. The site features videos, links and advice on what to do before, during and after a wildfire. The downloadable information includes a link to a wildfire evacuation checklist created by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Another resource Utahns should consider is the Utah Fire Info website, which has a map, updated daily, of active wildfires, and a rundown of the number of fires statewide during the year.
Wickens also touted the state’s Fire Sense campaign, which encourages Utahns to be careful during wildfire season. In past years, Wickens said, about 40% of Utah’s wildfires have been human-caused — compared with around 90% nationally.
“This year, we are seeing an increase in human-caused fires,” Wickens said. “We sometimes ask ourselves why and I believe this year is basically the conditions we had across the state of Utah are much more susceptible to start by one little spark.”
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