PHOTOS: When a campfire jumped its ring near a remote northern Maine lake last month, it took Maine Forest Rangers five days of ferrying resources by boat and digging away vegetation around the resulting four-acre blaze to stop its spread. Just a few weeks later, rangers returned to the area by helicopter, canoe and foot to douse a cluster of escaped campfires before they reached the surrounding 100 Mile Wilderness. Campfires and open burns were two of the primary causes of wildfires this August, when Maine saw more wildfires than in any other August over the last 20 years, according to the Maine Forest Service.
What made the landscape more susceptible to wildfires might seem counterintuitive: a wet spring. Plenty of rain in May sprouted the growth of fine fuels such as grasses and shrubs. Then three months of severe drought dried them out, turning the Maine landscape into a tinderbox. Wildfire experts are cautious about tying a long-term increase in wildfires to the influence of climate change in Maine. But they tend to agree that a warming climate will exacerbate the current drought conditions that cause wildfires to spread. The wild card: human activity.
“This is a pattern that’s being seen all over the place,” said Andrew Barton, wildfire ecologist and biology professor at the University of Maine at Farmington. “That kind of whipsaw from moist conditions to dry conditions really sets up places to burn.” With little chance for precipitation on the horizon, state and municipal fire officials say the state remains primed to burn as Maine heads into a historically active autumn fire season.
