As water levels in Falls Lake continue to dwindle down to record-breaking lows, officials from N.C. State and Raleigh may have even more to worry about when winter comes to an end.

The drought is setting the stage for a potentially dangerous spring fire season and the possibility of replenishment doesn’t look very likely.

The drought is setting the stage for a potentially dangerous spring fire season and the possibility of replenishment doesn’t look very likely.

According to Toddi Steelman, associate professor of forestry and environmental resources, wildfires are frequent in North Carolina, even more so than those in states with much dryer climates. But she said the fires are often much smaller in scale, especially compared to California’s deadly October wildfires, which burned about 2,000 homes and caused more than $1.6 billion in property damage.

Over the last 10 years, North Carolina has averaged about 4,500 fires a year, burning an average of 18,600 acres of land, Steelman said.

But so far this year, the state has reported 6,239 wildfires that have scorched 34,200 acres.

“And the year’s not over yet,” Steelman said.

In a speech Oct. 15, Gov. Mike Easley called for a ban on public burning as a direct result of the drought.

“The last thing we need is a forest fire, because we don’t have the water to put it out,” Easley said.

Steelman pointed out, however, that the state hasn’t experienced its first frost, which will generally cause leaves to fall from their branches. Until yards need raking, she said, it may be hard to tell how compliant North Carolina citizens have been.

“It depends how well people listen to the ban,” she said. “It’s an important proclamation to make, but that falls on someone to enforce it.”

As fall transitions into winter, North Carolina will move out of one of its two predominant “fire seasons,” which Steelman said will reduce the risk of wildfires.

But according to State Climatologist Ryan Boyles, the new season most likely won’t do a very good job replenishing the state’s resources.

“All indicators say it’s more likely to be dryer than normal, than near normal and above normal,” Boyles said.

The high potential for such an abnormally dry season stems from the La Nina cycle of the Southern Oscillation. The opposite of El Nino, La Nina means cooler waters in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Those lower temperatures affect the path of the jet stream, and often mean it won’t reach as far down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it would normally draw moisture to rain down on North Carolina’s Piedmont region.

Boyles said during the November-to-April period, normal rainfall is about 20 inches for North Carolina. But he said there’s a 50- to 70-percent chance that actual precipitation will be less than that.

And that’s causing state officials some concern.

“We need at least that for partial recovery,” Boyles said.

To fully recover from the drought, Boyles said the state needs 30 to 50 inches of rain over the winter. Although some of the state’s wettest years have resulted in 30 to 32 inches of rain, Boyles said getting 50 inches is “unheard of” in the climatology office’s more than 100 years of data.

“All indicators say we won’t fully recharge,” he said.

And Steelman said that could cause major problems for the spring, the state’s other predominant fire season.

Firefighters typically have a choice of tactics as they battle wildfires. They can use point-protection — a method of focusing suppression efforts on one area. They can also surround the fire completely in a method called full-perimeter protection.

But when water resources are low, firefighters are often forced to change the battle plan.

“We’re losing a lot of arrows in our quiver,” Steelman said.

Lower water levels can also set the state up for a more destructive fire season.

“What we’re going to see is fires in places where we typically don’t see them.”

University Fire Marshal Bill Stevenson said it all comes down to a simple adage many firefighters know well.

“You put the wet stuff on the hot stuff,” Stevenson said. “If you don’t have the wet stuff to put on the hot stuff, we’re in trouble.”

He said campus Fire Protection has had to alter some of its protocols in response to the drought, like being “a little more vigilant” when it comes to patrols. The department has also been more sensitive to the drought as it issues hot work permits, the documents that permit all heat-related activity, from welding to cooking, on campus.

But Stevenson said Fire Protection has also put a temporary halt to annual flow testing on campus fire sprinklers, which involves actually discharging water from the sprinkler heads.

“We’re not flowing water, but we’re checking everything else,” Stevenson said. “They’re incomplete until such time that we do those tests.”

He said Fire Protection will perform flow tests once the drought subsides.

According to Boyles, conservation efforts like these could have a big impact on how fast the state recovers from drought.

As one of Raleigh’s largest consumers, the University uses about 400 million gallons of water annually. The Office of Energy Management said NCSU is saving an average of about 340,000 gallons a day compared with August figures.

That means the University has reduced consumption by about a third, on par with Raleigh’s 33 percent cut in water usage since August, reported last week by the governor’s office.

Stevenson said students, faculty, staff and even construction workers have been very understanding of his department’s more stringent control measures, a fact he said will come in handy in the water conservation challenge against UNC-Chapel Hill.

“We’ll beat them like we beat them in football,” he said.