Lightning-Sparked Fires Keep Crews Busy in Nevada

Hundreds of firefighters from across the country headed west Thursday as crews braced for another round of lightning-punctuated storms. Lightning has already sparked 78 fires that have burned more than 300 square miles in Nevada.

“By the end of today we expect to have 2,300 firefighters on these fires,” said JoLynn Worley, spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Land Management. “About any state you pick, they are coming from.”

No injuries were reported and only one structure--a storage shed--was destroyed by the latest fires, sparked by more than 8,000 lightning strikes in Nevada during a 12-hour period Wednesday.

The strikes ignited bumper crops of highly flammable grass and sagebrush that have built up over five unusually wet winters in the high desert east of the Sierra Nevada.

More than 600 local, state and federal firefighters were quickly overmatched by dozens of fires burning hundreds of thousands of acres, mostly in the north-central part of the state.

“We had more severe fire behavior than we anticipated,” said Richard Brown, a bureau spokesman in Winnemucca, about 160 miles northeast of Reno. “We have matted grass and very hot, dry conditions.”

Law enforcement officials periodically shut down Interstate 80 near Battle Mountain and Winnemucca as flames jumped the road and smoke reduced visibility to zero.

Volunteer fire departments aided federal air tankers, helicopters and ground crews, often working in steep, rocky terrain.

“Our local resources are stretched very thin and lightning is not our friend,” said Rich Harvey, western regional chief for the Nevada Division of Forestry.

“Everybody is kind of sucking it up to help everybody else out,” he said. “Earlier this year we had a lot of our crews in Florida. This could be the time for payback.”

Fire crews also were battling blazes Thursday in Idaho and other areas where the dry spring and summer have created extreme fire danger.

“More lightning is forecast, so I can’t send everybody I own to another fire. We still have to protect our backside based on the weather forecast,” Harvey said.

The big fires Wednesday and Thursday already dwarfed the 80,740 acres blackened in Nevada all of last year.