Sizzling temperatures and gusty winds kept fire-fighters scrambling across the western United States on Thursday as wildfires blasted through hundreds of thousands of acres of desert scrub and bone-dry timberland.
In Oregon, Washington and California, emergency teams struggled to keep ahead of fires surging through rugged wilderness left parched after a dry winter season.
Altogether, officials at the National Fire Information Center in Boise, Idaho, reported that more than half a million acres, or 780 square miles, were ablaze, the largest area so far this year.
With fire-fighting teams, helicopters, rural fire engines and air tanker support all stretched to the limit, authorities declared a top- level alert - giving officials access to state resources and enabling them to draft plans to bring in the military. 'We haven't brought the military in yet, but it's on the doorstep,' said Sue Tholen, an information officer at the centre. Crews from as far away as Alaska, the East Coast, and southern states were already among the 21,000 people battling blazes across the west, Ms Tholen said.
In northeastern Nevada, firefighters worked to draw defence lines around the historic mining town of Midas, which was under threat as major blazes approached it from north and south. The town, which has only about 30 permanent residents and one major street, was crawling with fire-fighting personnel as engines took up positions to douse any sparks that might drift from the fires tearing through barren sagebrush just a few miles away, Elko dispatch fire information officer Melissa Petersen said.
The most ferocious fires were in the Pacific Northwest, where a relatively dry winter has turned vast stretches of timberland and desert into a tinderbox.
The Lakeview Complex in the Fremont National Forest, which has already torn through a total of almost 180,000 acres, firefighters had gained a handle on four of the five major blazes, although the fifth was still racing across the parched high desert countryside.
Along with the thousands of ground-based fire-fighters and the specially built 'wildland' fire engines used to navigate rough terrain, fire control officers have also turned to massive C-130 cargo planes retrofitted to carry flame retardant, which they dump on inaccessible areas.