Extreme Wildfires Grip Western US And Canada

Wildfire officials raised their preparedness level to the highest tier and Canada’s military joined evacuation efforts, as the region reels from the effects of consecutive heat waves.

A brutal start to the wildfire season in the western United States and Canada worsened Thursday as a massive Oregon blaze exploded in dry, windy conditions.

Wildfire officials raised their preparedness level to the highest tier and Canada’s military joined evacuation efforts, as the region reels from the effects of consecutive heat waves that experts say have been worsened by global warming.

Burning through the equivalent of 130,000 soccer fields, the Bootleg Fire some 250 miles south of Portland is the largest active blaze in the US, bellowing heavy smoke visible from space that is blanketing parts of neighbouring Washington and Idaho.

Firefighters have been dispatched from as far away as San Francisco to tackle the massive blaze, which is showing “extreme” growth through drought-affected brush and due to hot, dry and breezy conditions.

The inferno is just one of around 70 large fires burning some one million acres in the US alone. It began more than a week ago and is just seven per cent contained, has destroyed 21 homes and threatening almost 2,000 more.

And in California, the newly ignited Dixie Fire began ripping through land near the town of Paradise which was razed by the notorious 2018 Camp Fire — the deadliest in the state’s modern history, killing 86 people.

Elsewhere in California the much larger Beckwourth Complex — a combination of two blazes sparked by lightning last week — neared 100,000 acres Thursday.