Fire crews brace for the arrival of winds
» Firefighters have been making significant progress Wednesday on the biggest wildfires burning unusually hot and fast for this time of year in the western United States.
But forecasters from the Southwest to the southern High Plains warned of the return the next two days of the same gusty winds and critical fire conditions that sent wildland blazes racing across the landscape last week.
Some of the nearly 1,000 firefighters battling the biggest fire in droughtstricken New Mexico cut away brush and burned out any extra fuel Wednesday ahead of increased danger forecast Thursday into the weekend.
That allowed crews to dig fire lines around about a third of what has become the largest wildfire burning in the U.S. — now 94 square miles — and keep flames from reaching mostly rural homes and ranches that are still in its path northeast of Santa Fe.
“Another great day on the fire line,” federal fire incident commander Carl Schwope said Wednesday.
“Fire personnel are making great progress,” he told residents at a community meeting in Las Vegas, N.M., where numerous rural communities in the nearby mountains remain under evacuation orders.
But he quickly emphasized the success could be short-lived because hotter, drier, windier weather should return Thursday and Friday. “This fire still has tremendous potential to move and still has a lot of danger,” he said. “We have a couple of critical fire days still ahead.”
The most critical fire danger remains the next two days across practically the entire state of New Mexico, according to the National Weather Service. The elevated-risk area stretches all the way from Arizona’s border with California and Nevada into the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, the service said late Wednesday.
Some light precipitation added moisture to bone dry fuels in the Southwest early this week. But stiffening winds Wednesday likely dried out most of the fine fuels, which “are expected to be borderline critically dry” on Thursday, the service said.
The Southwest has been bearing the brunt of large fires, with five incident management teams assigned, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
One complex incident management team was overseeing a large fire in southwest Nebraska. More than 200 firefighters in that state were battling a prairie fire that has been burning since last week.
About 65 square miles of mostly grasses and farmland have been blackened near the Kansas line, several homes have been destroyed and at least one person was killed. The fire was about three-quarters contained Wednesday.
In Arizona, crews on Wednesday worked to contain two major wildfires, with firefighters gaining ground on containment of a blaze in the Prescott National Forest after winds on Tuesday pushed the fire outward. Near Flagstaff, crews patrolled burned areas of a different large fire and looked for hot spots.