Nation IN BRIEF : ALASKA : Rain Helps to Cut Wildfire Damage

Recent wildfires have burned 424,571 acres of land across the middle of Alaska, but rain has dampened the extreme danger, the Alaska Fire Service reported. Lightning sparked 202 separate fires that burned over a wide band of forest land and tundra from the Seward Peninsula in western Alaska across hundreds of miles to the Canadian border along the eastern edge of the state. The biggest fire was on 69,000 acres of the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge after “an impressive run to the east” nearly doubled the size of that blaze over the weekend, said Pete Buist from Bureau of Land Management fire headquarters in Fairbanks, Alaska. The town of Tok, Alaska, remained uncomfortably close to flames forming a semicircle around the town.