Burn acreage in the US through July 7 (700,000 acres) is lowest in the past ten years and less than one third of the ten year average.
National Fire News | National Interagency Fire Center
“In the conterminous United States during the preindustrial period (1500- 1800), an average of 145 million acres burned annually. Today only 14 million acres (federal and non-federal) are burned annually by wildland fire from all ignition sources.”
“Every year an average of 31,000,000 acres of forest land is burned over—an area larger than the State of New York.
Old trees still reveal scars of fires that occurred centuries ago… There are scar records of conflagrations in the big tree forests of California-as far back as A.D. 245 and again in 1441, before any white man had set foot in the West. We know that extensive fires swept over the forested mountain slopes of Colorado in 1676, 1707, and 1722, for venerable Englemann spruces still bear the scars. White spruce forests in Maine likewise tell of a fire that burned some 200 square miles in 1795.”
