Local, state, and federal fire crews are ready to roll as Minnesota wildlife officials say wildfire season is here earlier than expected.

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources(DNR) says the wildfire season was six weeks early, with wildfires starting to pop up in mid-February.

“We’ve had about 200 fires, for somewhere around 5,000 acres [burned], we usually don’t see those kinds of numbers till end of March [and] into April. So folks are busy,” Alex Gehrig, Acting Wildfire Prevention Supervisor with the DNR, said.

“They’re expensive. They destroy homes. They impact lives,” Gehrig added.

While most fires have been small, some were big enough for state fire crews to get a birds-eye view of what they were up against — like a wildfire near Waseca earlier this month.

“We’ve been seeing fire occurrences almost daily since the onset, about middle of February,” Leanne Langeberg, with the DNR’s Minnesota Interagency Fire Center, said.

She and the team at the Fire Center help track fires and coordinate crews.

“The way that we respond to wildfire in Minnesota[…]it’s almost more of an aggressive approach,” Langeberg said, adding that the response starts locally and then escalates to state and federal teams joining, depending on the severity of the fire.

Despite the early start to the season, she said all crews are ready to roll.

Gehrig and Langeberg say some help from Mother Nature would help in the form of steady rainfall. And always, people should lean on the wise words from Smokey Bear, ‘Only you can prevent wild fires.’

“90% of our wildfires are started by people. And most of those are not intentional. So there’s things that we can do,” Gehrig said.