The ferocious 2021 wildfire season in the West showed no signs of letting up Friday, as thousands of firefighters continued to battle dozens of blazes across the parched, overheated region.
“Currently, 70 wildfires have burned 1,061,516 acres across the United States,” the National Interagency Fire Center said Friday. “More than 17,700 wildland firefighters and support personnel are assigned to wildfires.”
The nation’s largest fire, the Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon, has scorched about 75 square miles, an area larger than New York City, fire officials said. The blaze has stymied firefighters for nearly a week with erratic winds and extremely dangerous fire behavior.
Authorities ordered a new round of evacuations Thursday amid worries the Bootleg Fire, which has already destroyed 21 homes, could merge with another blaze that also grew explosively.
Firefighters were all pulled back to safe areas late Thursday and into Friday due to intense fire behavior.
The fire was producing its own clouds, known as pyrocumulus clouds, which are dangerous columns of smoke and ash that can reach up to 6 miles in the sky and are visible from more than 100 miles away. Extreme fire behavior, including the formation of more “fire clouds,” was expected worsen into the weekend.
The wildfire has spread about 24,000 acres per day on average, which is an area larger than the area of Central Park each hour, or a rate of a football field burned every 5 seconds for 10 days, CNN meteorologist Brandon Miller said.
The Bootleg Fire is churning through forests of ponderosa and lodgepole pine wracked by drought this year followed by a long-running heat wave that has left much of the high-desert ecosystem parched and primed to burn, the Oregonian reported.
It has been a hot summer in much of the West, and that pattern is set to continue, AccuWeather said. By this weekend and into early next week, a heat dome is expected to become established in the northern Rockies and this will cause temperatures to skyrocket once again. Temperatures are forecast to soar above 100 degrees as far north as Montana.
Western wildfires: As fires rage, region to remain ‘tragically dry’ for at least a week. In Oregon, a blaze may burn until fall.
The nation has set 585 all-time heat records in the past 30 days, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Extremely dry conditions and heat waves tied to climate change have swept the West, making wildfires harder to fight. Climate change has made the American West much warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive.
Three years ago, Paradise was destroyed by the deadliest wildfire in US history: Now, the town nervously watches one burning 10 miles away.
Meanwhile, a fire near the Northern California town of Paradise, which burned in a horrific 2018 wildfire, caused jitters among homeowners who were just starting to return to normal after surviving the deadliest blaze in U.S. history.
The Dixie Fire ignited earlier this week in the area of Camp Creek and Dixie roads in Jarbo Gap, near where the 2018 Camp Fire sparked northeast of Paradise and claimed the lives of more than 80 people, KCRA-TV said.
California’s fire season has already seen more than three times as much land burned as during the same period last year, officials told CNN. And the 2020 record was the worst ever, with some 4.1 million acres burned, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
Contributing: The Associated Press
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Wildfires in the West: Extreme heat, drought fuel fierce fire season
