RENO, Nev. - Federal land managers restricted campfires and smoking across millions of acres of western Nevada Wednesday to help guard against wildland fires fueled by hot, windy weather.
Citing "extreme" fire danger, especially in dry grasslands, the Bureau of Land Management announced the prohibitions for all its public land areas, roads and trails in the western half of the state.
"All appearances are we are going to have an extremely active wildland fire season," Steve Frady of the Nevada Division of Forestry said Wednesday.
A week of steady winds and temperatures in the 90s have created the dry conditions that readily sustain brush fires on BLM and neighboring range lands, BLM spokesman Bob Stewart said.
"It is a very big concern this year," Stewart said.
"These fires ignite from whatever cause. So many have been in just a moment's carelessness or wind carrying something that shouldn't be carried and they just explode over the land," he said.
Smoking is prohibited except within an enclosed vehicle or developed recreation site on all BLM lands in western Nevada. Campfires are prohibited outside of developed recreation sites.
A special exception allows campfires and smoking within 100 yards of Walker Lake near Hawthorne and between Walker Lake and U.S. Highway 95, BLM officials said.
The BLM manages about 5 million acres in the western part of Nevada from its field office in Carson City.
As of Wednesday, more than 50,103 acres of Nevada have burned in 200 fires since the fire season opened last month.
Firefighters in southeast Reno had a close call Tuesday when a garage fire turned into a 5-acre brush fire that burned dangerously close to a residential neighborhood, destroying a garage, a barn and an outbuilding.
The biggest wildland fire in Nevada so far this year charred 12,000 acres of brush in northeast Sparks and east along Interstate 80 to near Wadsworth last weekend.
Days before, a fire roared through 3,000 acres of tinder-dry brush and sagebrush in southeast Reno, heavily damaging one house and a mobile home.
A series of other fires have burned over the past two weeks in southern, central and northeast Nevada as well.
Jim Reinhardt, chief of the East Fork Fire District south of Carson City, said conditions remind him of the dry stretch from 1984 to 1986 when Douglas County was hit by a series of dangerous wildfires.
"The fuels are extremely dry," he told the Reno Gazette-Journal. I would say fire danger is extreme. People have to be really, really careful."
Forest Service officers in Nevada were busy fighting a fire in Utah Wednesday and could not be reached for comment on the status of fire restrictions on national forests in the area, a spokeswoman said.
The Forest Service typically follows the BLM's lead in setting fire restrictions, Stewart said. But most of its forested lands are at higher elevations, where conditions are not as dry and fire threats not yet as severe.
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