As recovery efforts continue for the McKinley Fire, the Alaska Division of Forestry says lightning caused two smaller fires that burned more than a month before McKinley ignited. KTNA’s Phillip Manning has more.
July 3rd was the day the Montana Creek Fire was first reported. A few days later, on July 7th, the Malaspina Fire was first reported. The Alaska Division of Forestry says that’s not when those fires actually began, however. The official cause for both fires is listed as lightning strikes that happened more than a week earlier.
“A lot of those lightning storms had moisture with them that would actually cap off where heat had started at the base of trees or roots. And fires continued to burn because of the drought moisture codes were so high this summer, and you know within a week or two, once the wind dried the fuels on the top of the surface out, a lot of these fires popped up and they took off again”
That’s Cal Maki, Fire Prevention Officer for the Alaska Division of Forestry’s Mat-Su office. He says that, while lightning holdover fires aren’t all that common, they are far from unheard of.
“It is not very common. It is not. These were a little bit lengthy in the time that they held over the we had had multiple lightning holdovers in the state one down in the Kenai that went all the way up to twenty-one days which is very impressive for lightning to hold in the ground and not show smoke for that period of time.”
When a lightning holdover fire happens, it’s common for it not to be noticed on the first day. According to a research paper published earlier this year in the journal Fire, only half of lightning-caused fires are reported on the day they begin, and almost a quarter are reported a week or more after they are ignited.
It can be difficult to imagine fires caused by lightning flaring up on days without significant cloud cover, but Maki says the conditions required to form lightning aren’t always obvious.
“For that convective energy to build up doesn’t always require a broad front to come in, or a large weather system. They can be isolated clouds that throughout the map to value that we may not even see from the Parks Highway.”
While the causes of the Montana Creek and Malaspina Fires have been determined, the investigation of the much larger and more destructive McKinley Fire continues. Maki says the process of assigning a cause to a fire is a thorough one, but that a determination should come within the first half of October.
