BOISE, Idaho, June 12 (UPI) -- Weary firefighters battling the record-breaking wildfires consuming huge portions of Colorado can look forward to extremely hot weather, continued drought and a delayed rainy season this summer, according to experts at the government's National Interagency Fire Center.
After two days of touring the Colorado wildfires, including the massive Hayman fire that is pushing towards 100,000 acres just 55 miles southwest of Denver, Federal Emergency Management Director Joe Allbaugh headed to the center located in Boise, Idaho, for a briefing on what to expect.
"I wanted a national perspective on current conditions and a forecast," Allbaugh said on the way to the briefing. "I want to hear from the experts."
"It is extremely serious," Allbaugh said afterward.
According to the briefing attended by United Press International, Colorado and much of the American west can expect ideal conditions for wildfires to start and then burn out of control. A mass of hot, dry air is waiting in the Pacific, ready to roll across the West over the coming days. High winds and heat are predicted, likely to create what the fire experts called another "critical event" next week -- like the conditions that created the fires immolating Colorado now.
Relief in the form of a wet season that usually hits Colorado in July might be stalled by an unusually southerly flow of the Gulf Stream, pushing wet weather south. It is unclear if and when those rains might come toward Colorado, the officials said.
National drought conditions, the officials said, are extremely severe. The December to May period of this year was the driest in 107 years, fire officials said. The drought nationally is so severe that the missing precipitation in the lower 48 states since May 1998 is enough to fill all the Great Lakes three times.
"There are a lot of issues popping up that are going to get us," said Alice R. Forbes, acting director of Operations Fire and Aviation Management at the center.
Wednesday Allbaugh and Colorado Republican Gov. Bill Owens met with fire fighters in Durango, Colo., who are battling a 10,000-acre blaze northwest of that city. Fire officials said their plan was to prevent the fire from migrating to the south and west and drive it north into the wilderness. They predicted a 60 percent chance of success -- depending on the weather and the availability of aircraft -- or the fire would switch course and consume 700 homes at risk.
The wildfires in Colorado are the worst in state history. The eight raging fires all started before the June 15 official start of Colorado's fire season. The massive Hayman fire is four times larger than the largest fire the state has seen up to now.
According to Owens, by June 11, twice as many acres have burned in Colorado than during any full, summer-long fire season. In contrast to the massive Montana fires of the summer of 2000, the fires in Colorado like the Hayman fire, are particularly threatening to lives and property southwest of Denver.
In Glenwood Springs, a small bucolic town some 170 miles west of Denver, the 10,000-acre "Coal Seam" fire raced to the edges of town last weekend, destroying 31 structures -- mostly private homes.
Federal officials, including Interior Secretary Gale Norton who toured the Hayman fire Tuesday, said extremely dry conditions are plaguing much of the country and are particularly severe in the Rockies. "This is a year when severe drought is affecting much of the Rocky Mountain area," Norton told a group of reporters in Lake George, Colo.
Owens said the snowpack in Colorado is 2 percent of what it should be.
Allbaugh said the conditions are dire, fearing they could foreshadow a disastrous summer.
After the briefing in Boise, one fire expert told Allbaugh, "So now we've given you the doom and gloom."
