Weather May Assist Fighting Fires in Alaska

Lightning-sparked wildfires continued to spread Saturday across parched interior Alaska, but cooler moist air and an army of firefighters were beginning to get the upper hand, fire officials said.

“Humidity is up, temperatures are down, and we’re making some pretty good progress across the state,” said Frank Carroll from the federal Bureau of Land Management fire headquarters in Fairbanks, Alaska.

But the two biggest fires--the 47,000-acre blaze that has threatened the town of Tok and a 35,000-acre fire on the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge--continued to burn out of control.

Even though fire officials were predicting containment on some smaller blazes that had threatened dwellings, they had not let down their guard elsewhere that fires raged or where danger was called “extreme.”

“It’s very dangerous right now,” Alaska Gov. Steve Cowper said upon returning from an air inspection of fires near Fairbanks and Tok.

“I believe we’ve got 185 fires in Alaska now and that’s a very serious situation. At the moment, we are concentrating on the areas that jeopardize life and property and resources . . . and letting the others burn for a while.”

The Alaska Fire Service reported 280,225 acres ablaze Saturday.

The 47,000-acre Tok fire had quadrupled in size since Wednesday when it hurdled a river, crossed a highway and jumped fire lines, forcing the town to evacuate.

Fire lines carved around Tok by bulldozers held Friday, and Carroll said firefighters were switching from a defensive to an offensive posture Saturday and mounting direct attacks along the fire’s edge.

The Tok area remained smoky, making travel hazardous along the reopened Alaska Highway between the eastern Alaska town and the Canadian border.

Residents of the crossroads community of 1,200 returned home Friday, but uncertainty filled the town as the big fire burned in two directions.

Firefighters from Anchorage joined the battle over the weekend. In all, 2,400 firefighters from Alaska and the Western states were battling the blazes in Alaska, Carroll said.