Federal Blank Check OKd for Western Fires

With 1.1 million acres ablaze across the West, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said Friday that firefighters have a blank check to draw on the federal Treasury.

But he said no more manpower can be assigned because every available fire crew supervisor is already on the job, including several dozen from Australia and New Zealand.

Sending in more troops, for example, would be futile if no one is trained to supervise their efforts. He said it’s up to managers to use existing forces and equipment where they will do the most good.

The money from the Treasury can be used to cover overtime, lodging and transportation.

Nearly 19,000 civilian and military firefighters were spread throughout the West--14,000 of them in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. The fire center reported 92 major fires burning in the country on nearly 1.1 million acres. So far this year, fires have burned 5.22 million acres, the worst fire season in at least a half-century.

“It’s a very tough situation,” Babbitt said. “We’ve got two, three more weeks, maybe a month of fire season, and the weather prognosis is not very good.”

Babbitt declined to estimate the cost of the firefighting effort, which at the end of July was put at $15 million a day.

In Montana, ranchers on horseback tried to herd cattle out of the way of a 38,000-acre wildfire burning southeast of Helena. Other ranchers cut barbed-wire fences in the hope cattle would find their way to safety, said Ben Hess at the Gallatin County emergency operations center in Bozeman.

Other huge fires burning across Montana showed little movement.

In Wyoming on Friday, Gov. Jim Geringer declared the state a disaster area because of fires, drought and the resulting financial risk for farmers. A wildfire that closed the busy southern entrance to Yellowstone National Park was heading into wilderness, but another fire threatened a historic lodge built by Buffalo Bill Cody.

In Idaho, the 147,000-acre Clear Creek fire, the nation’s largest, was burning actively as fire crews labored to keep it away from a Girl Scout camp and the watershed for the city of Salmon.