Posted: 7/8/08 Section: News

Media Credit: The Associated Press Rick Ronstadt, firefighter with the Garden Grove, Calif. fire department, works on the Basin Complex Fire on the east side of Highway One near Esalen Institute in Monterey County in Big Sur, Calif., on Monday. The fire has charred 117 square miles in the Big Sur area and was just 11 percent contained Monday.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - In the past few years, Rich Nieto's work has started earlier and lasted longer.

The regional fire operations director for the Southwest Coordination Center said the West's fire season used to stretch from May into August or September, starting with blazes flaring up in the Southwest's arid spring.

But now fires touch off in April or earlier, and the season sometimes stretches into October, said Nieto, whose job entails allocating and moving ground-based firefighting resources.

"We have to adjust accordingly," he said.

A longer fire season can't be blamed solely on climate change or drought. More and more people want out of the cities and into the country - which in the West often means a place in the forest.

That raises the potential of more fires started by humans - cigarettes carelessly tossed; campfires that aren't dead; fires meant to burn weeds or garbage that instead get away.

In California, drought, high temperatures and lightning storms have contributed to more than 800 square miles being burned since June 20.

"What we're concerned about now is California is very active at a much earlier date than it usually is," said Don Smurthwaite, a spokesman for the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.

New Mexico's 2008 fire season has been driven partly by plentiful grass that sprang up in wet weather in 2007 but turned to tinder in this year's dry, windy spring.

The season began early with successive human-caused grass fires near Hobbs, N.M., in January, February and March that burned tens of thousands of acres, led to evacuations and destroyed several homes.

In addition, fire season is just beginning in the Great Basin states of Utah, Nevada, southern Idaho and eastern Oregon. As the summer moves on, the season will flow north into the Pacific Northwest as vegetation there dries out.

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