With Alaska’s wildfire season half over and cool, wet conditions in the forecast, the Kenai Peninsula has yet to see a major blaze. There’s no guarantee that it’s out of the woods just yet, though.
“The fact that we’re getting close to what would be the peak and we have another week of wet cool weather forecast I think it would be fairly hard, but not impossible, to see significant fires,” Julia Ruthford, fire weather forecaster with the National Weather Service in Anchorage, said. So far this year, the peninsula has avoided major fire outbreaks. The Alaska Department of Forestry had responded to 21 fires covering about 23 acres in the Kenai area as of Wednesday morning, according to the daily Alaska Interagency Coordination Center Situation Report. By comparison in 2015, during the second-busiest Alaska wildfire season on record, 14,086 acres of state forestry land had burned in the Kenai area by the end of the season. In 2017, when about half the average number of acres burned across Alaska, 21 fires burned 1,112 acres of state-protected lands on the peninsula.