Slow start to Interior Alaska fire season picks up quickly.
FAIRBANKS, Alaska - Which comes first, thunder or lightning? The answer is the lightning flash you see before hearing the thunder and many people in the Fairbanks area have been hearing the thunderstorms that have been occurring.
In many ecosystems, forest fires are beneficial but when they come close to homes or people, it can be dangerous.Sam Harrel, a public information officer at the Alaska Division of Forestry and Fire Protection also known as Alaska DNR explains this fire season is much different than previous years. Harrel says, “We’ve had so much rain though this year which has led to our slow start to a fire season and so the duff layer, the deeper layers of the duff, the vegetation that’s on the floors of our forest and cover our tundra and such, they’re damp enough that they’re not going to burn severely and go but the surface fuels are dry enough that this can spark off and ignite them.”
Due to the weather in the beginning of the summer, Harrel shares how much has already burned. “Here in the past two days we’ve increased 7,000 acres over our total acreage burned so far. We were a thousand plus acres and now were over 8,000 acres and so dramatic acreage increases like that are not new to us here in Alaska but it was a little surprising with how slow of a start we got just [because of] our continual wet and cooler weather,” said Harrel.
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