Smoke comes before fire, and lighting, apparently, comes before smoke. Wildfires set off by lighting strikes on Aug. 7 continued to ravage dry forests and brush across Idaho and parts of Utah Wednesday, one week after the blazes first began.
As of early Wednesday morning, 140 square miles of mountainous terrain have burnt down near Pine, Idaho, according to weather.com, an area just 50 miles to Boise's west, as the crow flies. That fire - the Elk Fire Complex - remains the nation's No. 1 firefighting priority as firefighters attempt to push the fire into an area of forest already burnt down by a massive inferno from last season. As of 8 a.m., the fire had destroyed 53 structures and was at only 10 percent containment, according to local website MagicValley.com. Still, dropping temperatures and lower winds have some local officials optimistic they can get the situation under control.
A few miles to the south of Pine, another large wildfire, the Pony Complex, has burned a nearly equal amount of terrain and is pushing south and east towards population centers along Idaho's state highway 20, though the fire department reports that blaze is 40 percent contained.
Meanwhile in Utah, the resort town of Park City has come under attack from higher winds, destroying a dozen homes over the course of two days. While the fire remains comparatively small (six square miles), it's only 5 percent contained, and evacuations will remain under effect through Wednesday evening.
According to the United States Fire Department's Active Mapping, there are 46 large fires currently burning in the United States, all in the West. Of those fires, 36 are uncontained.
Nonetheless, things could be worse. The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise reports that less than 3 million acres have burned this year, far less than the 5.9 million acres that had burned by mid-August last year, when the 2012 North American drought brought record breaking heat and turned the West into a veritable tinderbox.
No casualties have been reported yet in the fires.
- Contribute to this Story:
- Send us a tip
- Send us a photo or video
- Suggest a correction
