Fire officials expect more progress against Arizona wildfire
Reporting from Springerville, Ariz.
Aided by a second day of light winds, fire officials anticipated gaining more ground on the Wallow fire, which has pushed thousands of people out of their homes, blackened more than 400,000 acres of pine and spruce and destroyed dozens of structures in Arizona’s scenic White Mountains.
More than 3,000 firefighters attacked the blaze, which was 5% contained early Friday afternoon, as a grayish haze coated the sky. The Wallow fire has destroyed at least 29 homes, the majority in the resort town of Greer, and threatened 5,200 more.
Still, the favorable weather, which was expected to linger through mid-Saturday, led authorities to tell residents of Springerville and Eagar late Thursday that they possibly could return to their homes this weekend. The announcement was met with whistles and applause at a community meeting.
“We’re not out of the woods yet, but we’re getting closer,” incident commander Joe Reinarz told the crowd at a high school-cum-evacuation center in Lakeside.
Lifting evacuation orders, however, is contingent on whether fire breaks can hold Saturday, when flame-whipping winds are expected to sweep back into the region. Firefighters planned to spend much of Friday shoring up lines of defense near mountain towns and burning out new ones.
“We need to button everything up as much as we can so that when Saturday hits, we can hold on to it,” said Jim Whittington, a spokesman for the firefighting operation.
The second-largest blaze in state history, the Wallow had bedeviled firefighters since it was sparked May 29, possibly by a campfire. Only Thursday did gusts die down enough for firefighters to slow the flames’ spread through the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests and toward the New Mexico border.
That night, Whittington addressed reporters in front of a map that depicted the Wallow as a multi-tentacled red mass. For the first time, some of the perimeter was shaded black, meaning flames there had been hemmed in.
“Psychologically, to get some black on the map is a huge deal,” he said. We’ve been reacting to this fire since the beginning, and this is the first day we’ve really been able to go after it.”
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