Alaska Wildfire Triples in Size

Dense smoke from a wildfire in Alaska’s interior kept firefighting aircraft grounded as hundreds of people fled with their pets and belongings.

“Smoke is heavy,” Royce Chapman, a fire information volunteer, said Friday. “They can’t get aircraft to be able to spot where it is going.”

The fire about 30 miles northeast of Fairbanks has tripled in size in recent days to about 215,000 acres as wind and hot, dry conditions made the situation worse.

But the latest acreage figure was down by 10,000, based on revised mapping, and fire officials said an expected rise in humidity and a drop in wind speeds could help firefighters.

Since Tuesday, a handful of subdivisions and scattered cabins have been evacuated and hundreds of people have sought safety in Fairbanks, which was not threatened by flames but was overcome with dense smoke.

The American Red Cross set up a shelter for displaced residents at a high school in Fairbanks, Alaska’s second-largest city.

There were 62 active fires in Alaska on Friday, burning on more than 1 million acres. Most were in remote areas and simply being monitored. This year, 333 fires have burned nearly 1.7 million acres in Alaska.

In Arizona, meanwhile, firefighters reinforced lines to keep a 51,000-acre fire away from three mountain towns. The lightning-caused fire was about four miles away from Payson, a community of 14,000, about 70 miles northeast of Phoenix.

Near Kearny, about 75 miles southeast of Phoenix, a 50-acre fire briefly forced residents of about 40 trailers and a few houses to flee. Everyone was back home by the evening, authorities said.

In Nevada, smoke had died down Friday from a 1,200-acre wildfire 10 miles west of Reno. The fire had crept up to subdivisions near the California-Nevada line, but no evacuations were ordered.