Fire Officials to Seek Military Help in Growing Battle

Fire officials prepared Wednesday to ask for military reinforcements as weary firefighting crews battled dozens of large blazes across the West, marking the escalation of the fire season to a state of highest urgency.

That designation means firefighting resources, ranging from work crews wielding pickaxes to water-dropping helicopters, have been stretched dangerously thin. The Level 5 declaration, expected today, would trigger the request for military help, as occurred last summer when 3,000 soldiers and Marines joined fire lines.

Despite the continued heat and low humidity throughout the West, more than 20,000 firefighters were making general progress Wednesday battling the blazes, aided by mostly calm winds.

“For the most part, we’re holding our own,” said Don Smurthwaite, a fire information officer at the National Interagency Coordination Center in Boise, Idaho.

But the long-term outlook depended on what the weather would deliver late today and Friday, he added. Dry thunderstorms, delivering lightning and wind but little or no rain, were forecast for the Pacific Northwest, where a dozen or more fires were burning in scrub and scattered woodlands east of the Cascade Mountains.

“If we can get past the weekend, things will look better,” Smurthwaite said.

Most of the current fires were ignited last weekend as a rash of dry thunderstorms spewed lightning over the West’s mountain ranges. But in just the previous 24 hours, Smurthwaite said Wednesday afternoon, 215 new fires were reported.

“That sounds like a lot, but it’s actually a manageable figure,” he said. “It’s days when you get 300, 400, 500 fires that we really run into problems.”

So far, the fires now underway have burned about 376,000 acres, attributed mostly to the 43 largest blazes.

The Boise fire headquarters has recorded nearly 55,000 fires in the West so far this year, burning 2.2 million acres. By comparison, 66,629 fires were reported for all of last year, burning 4.9 million acres.

But last summer’s fires were worse, Smurthwaite said, because they began earlier in the summer and many were in dense forests, where flames licked 150 feet into the air from the tops of trees.

Most of this summer’s fires are burning in less dense vegetation, including eastern-facing mountain slopes with less tree growth, he said.

Still, the current fires have posed their own challenges, such as spreading fast in brush and grass, making it all the more difficult for firefighters to encircle them with sufficiently wide breaks to prevent windblown embers from igniting new blazes.

The request for military help would not spell immediate relief for county, state and federal firefighters, Smurthwaite said. Troops would first have to undergo 40 hours of firefighting training over several days.

Once trained, they would be dispatched to less-dangerous fire lines, where they would help construct firebreaks and extinguish smoldering vegetation. But their presence, Smurthwaite said, would relieve more experienced firefighters to tackle riskier assignments.

Among the more troublesome hot spots Wednesday were separate blazes closing in on the small mining town of Midas, in north-central Nevada. While firefighters contained one of the fires, a second fire approached to within a mile of the town and a third came within two miles. Together, they had charred 30,000 acres and were only 10% under control.

Several hundred firefighters converged on Midas, working to protect 28 homes, five commercial buildings and a host of gold mining facilities.

In California, firefighters gained ground on a fire in the Tahoe National Forest that had temporarily closed Interstate 80 to traffic through the Sierra Nevada due to smoke.

Already, botanists and other experts have been dispatched to the area to assess damage to the landscape and plan rehabilitation efforts, Ross Trotter of the U.S. Forest Service said.

In San Diego County, a fire near Ramona had grown to 800 acres Wednesday but was expected to be contained by nightfall, officials said. Because it is close to homes, 575 firefighters were swiftly sent in.

Firefighters in Oregon faced a host of fires, including a 44,430-acre blaze near Lakeview in the Fremont National Forest that was 30% contained.

Ten miles south of Medford, a 5,500-acre fire was burning close to the California border and was still not contained, although no structures were threatened. Two homes were destroyed by the fire last weekend.

A collection of small fires frustrated firefighters in Washington state, including one high in the Wenatchee National Forest, six miles from Leavenworth. The blaze was slowly advancing, and residents of 50 rural homes were warned of possible evacuations.

Another fire, in the Lake Chelan-Sawtooth Wilderness Area in north-central Washington, was growing Wednesday.

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Times staff writer Daniel Hernandez in Los Angeles contributed to this story.