Did you know that most wildfires are human-caused? Here are eight wildfire facts and statistics.
Questions popped like champagne corks when smoke first billowed a few weeks back south of Butte in the vicinity of Basin Creek.
Since then, the volume of smoke has varied according to wind and atmospheric variables. Especially vigorous billows pop more questions.
Bottom line: The fire is a prescribed burn of slash piles from timber cuts associated with the Basin Creek Project on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest.
"Prescribed fire in the area has been ongoing when conditions permit and will continue early into the new year," said Joel Hathaway, a spokesman for the Beaverhead-Deerlodge.
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The Basin Creek Project aims to reduce the likelihood of high-intensity, rapidly-spreading fire to reduce risks to firefighters and public safety, private property and water quality in the Basin Creek Municipal Watershed.
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Officials from both the U.S. Forest Service and Butte-Silver Bow County have worried that dead timber in the vicinity of the Basin Creek Reservoir could put the water supply at risk.
"Along with much of southwestern Montana, the watershed suffered significant impacts from mountain pine beetle following consecutive years of severe drought," the Forest Service reported. "Most of the lodgepole pine stands that reside within the watershed have succumbed to the beetle and are now standing dead or jack-strawed across the forest floor."
Officials said the accumulation of fuels posed a risk to Butte's water source if a wildland fire occurred in the watershed.
"Fuel loading of this nature can lead to high severity fire, which in turn can result in loss of soil stability and ultimately significant levels of soil erosion and run-off," the Forest Service said. "A single storm event could introduce large amounts of soil and woody debris from fire affected areas of the watershed, delivering large sediment loads to the reservoirs that would essentially result in having to take the water treatment plant offline."
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