Film Series on Wildfires Opens Friday

North 40 Producer & Director, Jeff Ostenson, presents a multi-media production, "The Era of the Mega-fires" this Friday, February 24th at the Chelan County PUD Auditorium at 6 PM.

Ostenson says we live in the era of the mega-fire. "This is a well accepted truth that the wildfires are getting bigger. The fire seasons are getting longer. They're becoming more catastrophic. More houses are burning. This is just data we have recorded for a hundred years."

A fire that is over 100,000 acres burned is considered a mega-fire. Ostenson says the number of those incidents have gone up significantly over the last hundred years. He has a theory on what caused the increase.
"Around the turn of the 20th century, early 1900's, we basically decided fire was the enemy and we put them out, and we kept on putting them out. We didn't let the forest do its natural job of cleaning up the forest fuels, and so those forest fuels built up. All the trees that wouldn't normally grow, call them the weeds of the forest, they grew into all the spaces. So now we have an exceptionally dense forest."

The show is free and open to the public. For a full list of showing dates and locations go to http://www.north40productions.com/wildfire