Wildfires Raging Across the West, Abetted by Dry Storms, Lightning

Dry, fitful thunderstorms with lightning in their bellies rolled across the West, sparking new wildfires that have consumed more than 826,000 acres in 11 states--threatening one of the worst fire seasons in history, federal officials said Monday.

In Montana, more than 500 homes were evacuated in the Bitterroot Valley as intense heat and gusty winds pushed three large fires together into a massive, 25-mile-long blaze in the hills above the town of Hamilton.

“It’s just about one of the most awesome sights I think a person would ever see,” Ravalli County Sheriff Perry Johnson said as his deputies helped close a several-mile-long stretch of U.S. 93. “These columns of smoke, they looked like mushroom clouds from a bomb.”

President Clinton today was scheduled to visit central Idaho, where federal troops have been called out to help battle several fires raging through the mountainous wilderness--including a single blaze in the Salmon-Challis National Forest that covers 162 square miles.

More than a third of the nation’s blazing wild lands are in Idaho, where 357,668 acres have been consumed and lightning strikes are igniting up to 50 new blazes a day, most of them quickly extinguished.

“This could shape up to be the worst fire season in Idaho in 65 years of records kept,” Gov. Dirk Kempthorne said. “The conditions will only worsen. We’re still in for a hot summer.”

Mesa Verde Blaze Threatens Artifacts

Firefighters also were battling a blaze at Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park, closing it for the second time in a month. Five thousand acres have been consumed so far, and the fire is threatening a number of ancient cliff dwellings and a center containing 2 million Southwestern artifacts.

A total of 73,343 acres has burned in the Sequoia National Forest near Kernville, with eight major wildfires in California now blackening 92,250 acres. A 10,600-acre blaze five miles east of Temecula was about 45% contained, with full containment expected by Thursday.

All told, 65 major fires were burning by late Monday, bringing total wildfire losses so far this year to 4.03 million acres--nearly double the average over the last 10 years.

Federal officials cautioned that more trouble almost certainly is yet to come. A line of unstable air is expected to move in over Oregon and Washington this week, bringing more isolated thunderstorms with minimal rain--and worrying potential for new lightning strikes.

Just as significant, officials said, is that a full two months of hot, dry fire weather lies ahead.

“The season started earlier than usual, and the weather forecasts . . . don’t call for any early rains,” said Mary Stansell of the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.

“With this dry lightning, it’s just really dry and hot. You get the east winds in the afternoon that roll in and make the fire more active,” she said. “Plus, lots of the terrain is in steep areas, and there are just several [blazes] going at the same time. . . . It’s got the potential to be a pretty serious fire season.”

Marines Sent to Fire Lines

Firefighting agencies have mustered a total of 17,279 firefighters and support staff from 47 states, Canada and Mexico. Federal troops have been called out for the first time since 1996, with 1,800 service members--including active duty and National Guardsmen--summoned for hasty firefighting training.

The 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment from Camp Pendleton arrived in Idaho Falls over the weekend to join firefighters battling the blaze 20 miles northwest of Salmon--which moved with stunning speed over the weekend to become the largest wildfire in the country.

Meeting with U.S. Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck Monday, Kempthorne said that the fire--which started at just 200 acres--flashed across 25,000 acres in a four-hour period, a 10-mile run. It now spans 102,382 acres, destroying the two longest wood-pole power line crossings in the country.

Clinton was scheduled to visit troops from Ft. Hood, Texas, who are battling a 23,000-acre blaze in the Payette National Forest, 23 miles north of the resort town of McCall, Idaho.

But interagency fire officials were focusing their most intense efforts in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, where rural homes near the ranching towns of Hamilton and Darby were threatened by blazes that were closing in from three directions.

“We had three larger fires and a few smaller fires that essentially burned into one large fire,” said U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman Liz Stevenson-Shaw.

“We had an inversion layer that was kind of holding everything into the valley. That lifted yesterday, and when that lifted, those fires took off,” sweeping from 60,000 acres to more than 100,000 acres in a single day. “We’re starting to get some increased fire activity again today,” Stevenson-Shaw said Monday. “I’m looking south, and we’re seeing big columns of smoke going back up. So I think the only thing we can hope is, God, I hope it doesn’t get anywhere near what it was yesterday.”

On Sunday, whirling embers temporarily closed a fire camp near Sula, and at least eight homes and seven other structures were lost in one gulch in that area, officials said. Surveys in adjacent areas were expected to bring the inventory of losses even higher. New evacuations were ordered Monday morning in a threatened drainage along Sleeping Child Road, southeast of Hamilton.

“We’ve had numerous, numerous evacuations, and I guess I should point out, this comes to a county that has never experienced evacuations before,” Sheriff Johnson said. “We’ve just been blessed before. But this time, I guess, the moons are all in the right position. The air is dry, the forests are dry, and the lightning is striking.”

Sandy Allred was evacuated Sunday night, along with residents of 250 other homes in the Pinesdale area near Hamilton. She returned to the house Monday to pick up a few more possessions.

“I’m better off than most people: A lot of people lost their homes yesterday in the Sula/Darby area. The wind’s blowing this way right now, but there are choppers up there fighting it, and they’re trying to make a line up there,” Allred said.

So Many Bad Fires, So Little Manpower

“We have so many bad fires in the Bitterroot Valley right now,” she said. “They’re really doing the best they know how, but there just aren’t enough planes and enough manpower and enough fire engines to put them all out. There’s not enough to go around.”

Allred’s husband, she said, would stay behind to try to protect the house as long as he could. She was loading up photographs, insurance papers and birth certificates. She packed up several mattresses she recently bought on credit. “I’m still paying on those,” she said.

A neighbor, Debbie Burt, was advised to evacuate, but was putting it off as long as possible. “For the moment, we’ve packed our stuff up, and if it gets looking real scary, we’ll leave,” she said. “We’re kind of all watching.”

Sunday night, about 250 Bitterroot Valley residents met with firefighting commanders, some demanding to know why the fire hadn’t been battled more aggressively in its early stages.

“These aren’t the kind of fires we are trying to run out in front of and stop,” incident commander Steve Frye told them. “It just won’t work. You take the opportunities that a fire allows you to take. It’s not safe and it’s not smart to do it any different.”

Saving lives is of the highest priority, he said, followed by saving what homes and structures can be saved. “Containment,” he said, “is a low, distant, third priority.”