USA: Wildfire risk shifts from Texas to Mountain West-experts
While last year Texas saw 30,000 separate fires and tens of thousands of people had to be evacuated, this year the National Interagency Fire Center does not predict significant wildfire risks in the state during the summer. As wildfire analysts explain in the article of Alertnet, this is due to the El Nino effect, which brings wetter weather to the Southwest, and thus, pushes the the fire risk to north to other states.
"El Nino means the possibility of an above-average fire season in the great basin of Nevada and Utah, and elsewhere in the Mountain West, and on to the mountains of Southern California in the fall," said Jeremy Sullens, a wildfire analyst with the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.