Strong Winds Fuel Fears in Mont. Fire Area

Firefighters raced to make as much progress as possible against a menacing wildfire Saturday before expected windy weather could whip the flames into another dash across the countryside.

The blaze near Toston had swept across 100,000 acres in three days.

Cool temperatures and light rain kept it quiet during the night, officials reported Saturday, but a cold front was expected to arrive with strong wind and no moisture.

“The winds today are estimated at the top of the ridges to be 40 mph plus,” said Graver Johnson, a fire information officer near Toston, 60 miles southeast of Helena.

“Historically, we know those weather systems can undo everything that has been done. We have a heads-up today for all firefighters,” said Jon Silvius, information officer at a fire near Hamilton, in extreme western Montana.

About 600 firefighters, including 200 National Guard troops, battled the Toston fire Saturday.

Army officials announced Saturday that about 500 soldiers had been called up from the 101st Airborne Division at Ft. Campbell, Ky., to help fight wildfires in Montana, bumping the Army’s numbers on the fire lines to more than 1,600. Montana Gov. Marc Racicot also announced that a Marine battalion from Camp Lejeune, N.C., would be joining the effort.

Twenty-seven major fires in Montana have burned more than half a million acres so far, including more than 242,000 acres in the Bitterroot Valley of southwestern Montana. They have destroyed 175 homes and other buildings since late July.

They were among 94 fires burning Saturday in Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wyoming, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. Those fires had blackened more than 1.1 million acres.

The Toston blaze started Tuesday as a spark in a wheat field, burning 20,000 acres by Thursday, then it exploded Thursday night and swept across about 80,000 additional acres of range land and scattered timber.

No houses were lost to the fire near Toston, but some rural families were still out of their homes.

Service had been restored Saturday on twin 500,000-volt power lines that shut down automatically Friday when the fire burned underneath them. Workers took one down again for several hours Saturday to replace insulators. The lines carry electricity from a southeastern Montana power complex to the Pacific Northwest.

Ranchers and volunteers fanned out across the countryside Saturday to rescue cattle. Ranchers abandoned several hundred head of cattle Friday in the Wall Mountain area as the fire drove to within a couple of miles.

Most other fires in Montana were relatively quiet overnight, but new evacuations were ordered near Darby, in southwestern Montana, and near Libby, in the northwest.

After Montana, the next major fire center was Idaho, where the 25 large fires active Saturday had blackened 421,000 acres.

This year could become a repeat of the great fires of 1910, said Jim Caswell, supervisor of the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho. In 1910, several large fires in Idaho and Montana swept across 3 million acres, killing more than 80 people.