Exhausted Crews Battle 34 Forest Fires in Washington : Disaster: The blazes are among dozens roaring in seven states. Resources are being stretched in what officials are calling the worst season in decades.

Sprawled on the grass beside a pear orchard Sunday afternoon, 40 dirty and bedraggled firefighters stared at a thick column of orange-gray smoke rising off a steep slope overlooking this Bavarian-theme resort town.

Their rest did not last long. “Listen! You can hear it,” two of them said in unison as orange flames leaped skyward and the hissing of orchard sprinklers was drowned out by the crackle of burning sage and timber in the forest less than a mile away.

Exhausted and weary, the team of firefighters trained to combat structural blazes in the nearby community of Yakima geared up once again to save lives and property from one of 34 forest fires burning roughly 15,000 acres in the Wenatchee National Forest of north-central Washington.

Authorities had to reach back to the turn of the century to recall anything comparable to the fast-moving fires that have torched at least 28 homes in the region and destroyed an estimated 100 additional structures since Friday. “These fires are incredible,” said Leo Knowles, a spokesman for the Chelan County sheriff’s office. “There is nothing to compare them to over the past 100 years.”

Jack Zaccardo, a spokesman for the state Department of Natural Resources, said, “We saw columns of smoke that rivaled what we saw on Mt. St. Helens when it erupted.”

Zaccardo also expressed frustration over the emphasis that firefighters are having to place on protecting private property at the interface separating wilderness and expanding urban boundaries.

“We are protecting the houses first and therefore we cannot be as aggressive as we normally would in fighting the forest fire,” Zaccardo said.

The fires here are among dozens of other major blazes roaring across seven states that are stretching resources to the limit in what federal fire authorities are calling the worst fire season in decades.

The fires erupted Friday in Icicle Creek Canyon, a few miles southwest of Leavenworth. By Sunday, they had damaged a water-treatment plant in Leavenworth, where residents were being warned to boil their water. About 1,500 people have been evacuated in the arid eastern slopes of the Cascades.

Fire officials warned another 6,000 people Sunday afternoon to prepare to leave as winds picked up and propelled a fire to within four miles of the city limits of the apple-growing town of Cashmere.

Twenty-five miles to the north, a fire that scorched 90,000 acres of grass, sage and pine veered from the lake resort community of Chelan on Saturday.

Throughout the sparsely populated mountains here, smoke was so thick that breathing was difficult, and travelers were advised to turn on their headlights.

With resources stretched thin, Washington Gov. Mike Lowry and Oregon Gov. Barbara Roberts signed their first interstate agreement to exchange firefighters and equipment. For the 3,700 fatigued firefighters on the lines, some from as far away as Florida, additional help came Sunday with the arrival of 500 National Guardsmen from Oregon, and the first of two battalions of Marines from Camp Pendleton.

Meanwhile, more than 1,000 evacuees waited to see if their homes would still be standing when they returned.

Among them is Karl Reuss, 58, a retired aircraft engineer who moved here from Rowland Heights in 1991 and built a home in a wooded section of Icicle Canyon.

“I’m concerned about it. On the other hand, God gave it to us and he can take it away,” said Reuss, who has been staying at a Red Cross shelter here since Friday with his wife, mother, daughter and granddaughter. “Nothing says we can’t start it again.”

With temperatures climbing to 90 degrees and the National Weather Service predicting a chance of isolated lightning storms over the next few days, fire officials were resigned to more long, hot struggles.

“Fire gets in trees like that and starts crowning,” firefighter Todd Maltais said, nodding toward a stand of ponderosa pines on the steep ridge overlooking Leavenworth. “Then nothing’s going to stop it.”

Elsewhere, fires sparked by lightning blazed out of control in Oregon, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, California, Montana and British Columbia. In Montana, a tanker plane crashed near the Flathead Indian Reservation on Friday, killing its two crew members.