Fires in Five States Termed a ‘Nightmare’

With no more crews or equipment to spare, the nation’s Western firefighting center scrambled Wednesday to cope with the worst 48 hours in its history.

“It’s kind of a nightmare,” said Erik Martin, a fire information officer on loan to the Boise Interagency Fire Center, from Colorado.

More than 1,500 fires ignited by lightning striking an average of 50,000 times a day had been set in five Western states, and hotter days and higher winds were expected to make the situation even more critical by the weekend.

At least one firefighter had been killed and 45 were injured.

16,000 Battle Fires

Some 16,000 firefighters, including National Guardsmen and prison inmates, were battling the flames on all fronts. So many crews had been flown in--from points as distant as Alaska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia and New York--that authorities estimated there were only about 1,000 professional firefighters available in the rest of the country.

Northern California, with its tinder-dry Sierra, had the lion’s share of the action--910 fires, at least half of them still out of control.

Another 600 were reported in Oregon, and several were burning in Idaho, including a 2,600-acre blaze that forced 1,000 residents from their homes. Several small fires were burning in Nevada and Wyoming, including one near Yellowstone Park.

The biggest single blaze was one that began 32 days ago in the mountains of central Idaho. It burned 15,000 acres, doubling its size in a single day, after being left to burn itself out, and fire officials said no effort is being made to control it.

“Policy now is to let these fires alone in wilderness areas, because it is part of the normal ecosystem,” U.S. Forest Service spokesman Samuel Harrison explained. “And in any case, I don’t know where we would get the men and equipment to make any kind of fight.

“We’re at our limit--and past it--already.”

In California, where more than 225 square miles of timber and brushland have been laid waste by lightning-sparked fires since last Friday, nearly 12,000 firefighters--some of them from as far away as Maine and New York--were on the line.

Most in Remote Areas

Although most of the fires were in remote areas, posing little danger to structures or people, about 700 residents of Tuolumne City were ordered to leave their homes as a 50-foot-high wall of flame moved toward the eastern outskirts of their community, near the northern entrance to Yosemite National Park.

“We just moved up here, so it’s a big shock,” Renee Ohler, 17, said as she and her brother stood with several other spectators on a mountain road near the hamlet of Wards Ferry, watching as tree-eating flames rose up a ridge from a black, smoke-filled valley.

“It’s really scary. We’re just waiting to see if they’re going to evacuate us.”

Ohler and her brother Don, 22, moved to Tuolumne City from San Jose a month ago. They run a cafe in town.

Their home, and all the other dwellings in Tuolumne City, remained undamaged late Wednesday. But elsewhere in the state 20 structures, including four homes, had been destroyed in the fire epidemic, which also accounted for 52 injuries and was blamed for the death of one firefighter who was struck by a tourist’s motorcycle.

At midday Wednesday the California Department of Forestry said 134,153 acres had been burned thus far in the state--an increase of 45,000 acres in less than 24 hours.

Fires were burning from the foothills of Mt. Palomar on the south to Happy Camp near the Oregon border and continuing on a broad arc through the Sierra and the Cascades. The largest blazes still uncontrolled were two in Klamath National Forest and another in Stanislaus National Forest near Yosemite, as smaller fires burned in Tahoe and Shasta-Trinity national forests.

Tess Albin-Smith of a joint federal-state fire control center in Sacramento, said the Stanislaus National Forest fire was receiving priority Wednesday, based on its major threat to life, property and value of the natural resources.

But all the lines remained seriously undermanned.

“It’s really hot out there and exhausting. They keep us out there for hours,’ Ivan Smith, a firefighter-state prison inmate from the Baseline Camp in Jamestown, said as he took brief rest under a fire truck. “There’s definitely a shortage of manpower out there.

In Klamath National Forest, fire information officer John Silvius said 168 fires, some having joined each other, burned some 14,000 acres of brush and timber, and predicted the battle there could take “a very, very long time--minimum a week.”

‘Short of People’

“We are extraordinarily short of people,” Silvius said. “Some fires had as few as 15 firefighters on them. It’s the best we can do.”

In addition, he said, smoke was holding near the ground, reducing visibility and hampering air tankers and helicopter spotters.

In Oregon, about 600 lightning-caused fires burned about 28,000 acres of forest and rangeland, forcing evacuation of dozens of homes and destroying eight buildings.

Ray Naddy of the Salem fire information center said prospects for controlling the situation are dependent, now, on the weather. And forecasters had bad news.

“We’re expecting some marine air that will bring in some higher winds,” Naddy said. “That’s got people nervous.” He said winds could cause the blazes to threaten more homes and force more evacuations.

The National Weather Service said increased sea breezes today should offer some relief along the coast--but thunderstorms and high temperatures were expected to continue.

And a weak upper-level low pressure area moving through the Pacific Northwest added to the problem, fanning the fires with winds that gusted to 30 m.p.h. in several places.

Thick reddish-gray smoke hung over the southern third of Oregon, where 3,000 firefighters braved temperatures in the 90s in their effort to contain fires that raced through the forests parched by record-high temperatures.

Scientists studying the possibility of a “nuclear winter” flew two aircraft loaded with instruments over the fires in southern Oregon in an effort to learn more about the effects of concentrated smoke. They said they intend to repeat the flights as long as conditions warrant.

The largest and most dangerous of the forest fires appeared to be a complex of 13 to 16 fires burning about 4,000 acres in an eight-square-mile area straddling the Oregon-California border.

The Longwood Complex of fires burned to within two miles of Takilma, near the border, and U.S. Forest Service authorities said they had officials in the town helping residents protect their homes.

“If the wind comes up, we could have some problems,” said Kerry Arneson of the Forest Service.

Monday the fire burned six structures in a rural area about 2 miles south of Takilma.

Another blaze in Josephine County--the Silver fire west of Grants Pass--burned 2,200 acres in terrain so steep and rugged that firefighters had to be called off the blaze. “Burning logs were rolling down,” Arneson said. “It was real, real hazardous.”

No new forced evacuations were reported, but authorities said several families had left their homes as a precautionary measure.

John Haddon of the Douglas Forest Protective Assn. said the Fall fire, 12 miles east of Roseburg, burned about 2,000 acres, while the Dixonville and Frozen Creek fires each burned about 1,000 acres.

The other large blaze in the Douglas County area, known as the Angel fire, spread to 1,800 acres near the Douglas-Jackson County on Wednesday and the Apple and Clover fire complex burned about 2,000 acres.

The largest fire on Bureau of Land Management land was a 4,000-acre grass and brush fire north of Horse Mountain, between Christmas Valley and Wagontire in Lake County. That fire was reported fully contained Wednesday.

In Idaho, fire bosses said they expected to contain a 2,600-acre blaze today that leveled a $200,000 house in a Pocatello subdivision and drove 1,000 people from their homes. The residents have been allowed back and no injuries were reported.

And in Wyoming, a lightning fire near the south entrance to Yellowstone National Park had grown to 60 acres, but a spokeswoman said it posed no threat to the park.

Tamara Jones reported from Boise, Ida., and Ted Thackrey Jr. from Los Angeles.