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More than 90,000 fires made up last year's U.S. wildland fire season.
After 10 years with the Bureau of Land Management office in Elko, Nevada, Janice Stadelman has seen her share of wildfires. Even by a veteran's standards,1999 was a horrific year in her area.
"Usually, a wildfire will slow down at night," says Stadelman, a mineras reclamation and compliance specialist who pitches in as a dozer boss during wildfire season. "But these fires didn't want to slow down."
Stadelman isn't the only one to remark on the fires' insistence. In fact, if the La Nina-propelled 1999 wildfire season can be summed up in a single word, it's "relentless."
The long, erratic season started in February with large fires in the southern tier of the United States stretching from California across New Mexico and into Florida and South Carolina. Fires then skipped around the Upper Midwest, South, and East during the, spring and ignited some 1 million acres 404,686 hectares) in Alaska during the spring and summer. By late summer, much of the most serious fire activity had settled into the Great Basin, and even then, activity was unpredictable, thanks to wind shifts that swept fires back and forth across Interstate 80. Those fires were soon followed bv blazes that burned for months on opposite ends of California. The season finally came to an end in late November, a month during which 22 different states reported tires
In all, 92,651 wildfires burned a sprawling 5,632,043 acres (2,279,207 hectares) across the United States last year, nearly twice the annual average acreage burned over the past 10 years, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. During a season that lasted the better part of 11 months, fires swept through Alaska and much of the lower 48 states and claimed the lives of 15 firefighters in eight states.
In Nevada alone, home to the nation's three largest fires in 1999,1.6 million acres (647,497 hectares) burned, and, while seemingly unquenchable western fires grabbed headlines-the Big Bar Complex fire in California's Shasta-Trinity National Forest burned from August 23 until November 3-activity in the east was up, as well.
Incendiary as Mother Nature's thunderbolts may have been, however, they met with strong resistance. Thanks to advance planning, interagency coordination, a...