Posts published in July 2007

The title of the blog caught our attention some months ago: A Seattleite in Idaho. That figured to be interesting, and a number of the posts since then have been. Culture shock is usually readable.

The blogger, Jessica, has moved on. She moved from Seattle to Pocatello to attention Idaho State University, and has graduated. Now she's in Las Vegas, and writing about the political atmosphere there. As another observer of interstate comparison, we'd suggest a look at what she's found, and in some cases leaving behind.

The recent spate of heavy fire seasons has begun to result in a fire politics too, in rural areas. Some of this played out today in a piece in the Twin Falls Times News.

South-central Idaho is a logical place for it, since this is on the southern end of the hottest fire territory in the country. Three adjacent counties stretching across much of southern Idaho - Owyhee, Twin Falls and Cassia - have been declared fire disaster areas by Governor C.L. "Butch" Otter.

Last night, about 120 ranchers and others from these rural areas gathered in the small city of Castleton and fired questions at Tom Dyer, director of the Bureau of Land Management in Idaho. Many of them had to do with the Murphy Complex fire, which reportedly ran to nearly 900 square miles. They asked if the agency could have kept it from becoming so massive if they'd hit harder, earlier? (Current reports are that it is now smaller in size but still only 20% contained.)

Some of them argued that grazing regulations left too much vegetation in place, serving as fuel when the fires took off.

Could go in a variety of directions, but fire looks like a front-burner (sorry - would you rather we called it incendiary?) issue for a while, especially if the fires continue getting worse.

Driving around the Northwest week before last, we were struck by the amount of smoke in the air. And got to see one substantial-size burn, south of I-84 in the Irrigon-Hermiston area. A hot summer, and dry around the region until the last few days, the fires have had little to tamp them down.

The latest run of showers around the western part of the Northwest seems to have helped. But not everywhere. The National Interagency Fire Center says fires now have become concentrated heavily around Idaho - this map certainly confirms as much. As does the Idaho governor's office, which has declared fire emergencies in five counties. Such emergency declarations aren't commonplace in Idaho.

As does the Spokesman-Review's Betsy Russell, on Boise's air quality at the moment.