US: Firefighters left helpless as huge blaze moves closer to threatened resort town writes Patrick Smyth, Washington Correspondent
Two of the most devastating forest fires in Arizona's history merged over the weekend to create a wall of fire over 100 feet high advancing on a two to three mile front, leaping natural and artificial fire breaks.
The blaze has already consumed 300,000 acres (480 square miles) of forest and 185 homes yesterday was pressing closer to the small resort town of Show Low.
The town's 8,000 residents have been evacuated and fire officials warn that saving it may be beyond them. "The fire has abated a little but we're still in a lot of danger here," fire spokesman Mr Jim Paxon, said yesterday, describing the fire as the "biggest and meanest" he had seen.
"We think it's an inevitability that the fire is going to enter Show Low. We don't have any good place to stop this fire," he said.
"It's a freight train racing toward us," Governor Jane Hull said on Sunday. Overnight exhausted fire crews were trying to use controlled burns to clear areas ahead of the fire and deprive it of fuel. "There's a 50-50 chance it will be successful," Mr Paxon told CBS.
Tinder-dry conditions, drought, and strong winds have powered the fires whose smoke has now merged with a neighbouring Colorado fire that started on June 9th and have devoured 60,000 acres of forest in the southwest of the state.
A larger, 137,000-acre blaze south of Denver has destroyed at least 133 homes but is 69 per cent contained.
Across the West, 17 large fires are burning on nearly 722,000 acres in seven states, according to the National Inter-agency Fire Centre.
Thus far nearly 2.3 million acres have burned, more than double the 10-year average of 920,000 acres.
For the firefighters in Arizona there is little they can do. Such is the ferocity of the fire that trees are exploding showering burning timbers and embers across the fire breaks cleared by volunteers to spark yet new blazes.
"Five days ago I had a pretty simple life," said Navajo County Sheriff Jerry Butler.
"Today I sucked a lot of smoke. I'm one of those that by the end of the day won't have a home.
"But so far, we haven't lost a life or even had a severe injury, and that's what's important."
Meanwhile, investigators probing the causes of the fires have been shocked by some of the explanations.
One of the two fires which linked up on Sunday was caused on Thursday by a lost hiker who wanted to attract attention, the other, started on Tuesday, is also said to have had a human cause, while the largest of the Colorado fires appears to have been caused by a distraught forest worker burning a letter from her estranged husband. But there has also been political criticism of the failure of spend cash to manage the forests properly. Mr Dale Bosworth, chief of the US Forest Service, said active management of forest lands is the key to preventing catastrophic wildfires.
"There is a choice. There is a way. We don't have to have this kind of fire burning in the national forest, threatening communities and destroying homes," Mr Bosworth said.
"The way is by doing some active management on the land. That way is thinning the forest, getting fire back into these fire-dependent eco-systems."
Governor Hull said the failure to clean out dry, overgrown forests helped create the conditions that allowed the Arizona fire to grow so fast so quickly.
Ms Hull said many national forests like the Apache-Sitgreaves need to be thinned through timber cutting or prescribed burns as a means of preventing catastrophic wildfires.
And, she said, environmentalists have fought many thinning projects in national forests.
