Sheriff: 3 firefighters killed battling wildfire in Washington state

The B.C. Wildfire Service says the fire is now 50 per cent contained, but less smoke and better mapping reveal flames have scorched 42-square kilometres of bush.

“This is an unprecedented cataclysm in our state“, he said.

The 50 acre fire was burning eight miles west of the town and threatening 20 nearby buildings. Various evacuation orders remained in effect. About 200 soldiers have been deployed from the Joint Base Lewis-McChord to join the more than 26,000 firefighters battling the fires.

“We are devastated by the tragic loss of three of our Forest Service firefighters”, said spokesman Mike Williams of the U.S. Forest Service.

“It’s a eerie post-apocalyptic sight”, Kerns said from Twisp. Working with all of our agencies.

Rogers says homes burned Wednesday night in the Twisp and Winthrop areas, about 115 miles northeast of Seattle, but he did not know how many.

The Okanogan. We can not treat them like experienced crews. I see sprinklers going all through town. Three different injured firefighters have been taken to space hospitals as properly, nevertheless their circumstances have been unknown.

The houses are in a canyon on a highway north of the small town of Noxon.

Seattle City Light evacuated employees from the town of Diablo as the fire raced towards the utility’s Skagit Hydroelectric Project. “The fires have just exploded”, Angela Seydel, a spokeswoman for the Okanogan County Department of Emergency Management, told the Associated Press.

“It’s like the fire season gas pedal has been pushed to the floor in a really short period of time, and that’s stressed our resources”, Frederick said. “The winds are nasty, and as this has spread, we’re having to send everybody south. We’re just trying to get everybody out of harm’s way and safe”. Governor Jay Inslee released a statement on the dead.

“Our goal is to avoid any accidental fires on OPRD property that would further tax limited firefighting resources”, said MG Devereux, the department’s deputy director.

President Obama is directing his administration to provide federal funds to the state as necessary.

Down the coast from Washington, in California, where record extreme drought has hung on for four years, the fires are also bad.

The National Weather Service issued a red-flag warning for a swath of Washington that includes the Okanogan valleys and highlands, saying that “critical fire weather conditions” would continue through Friday. Officials said temperatures will climb above 90 degrees and relative humidity will drop as low as 14 per cent.

With so many blazes burning across the West, the fire slid from the top of the national wildfire priorities list. “And the winds are still blowing”.

Twisp and Winthrop have a mixed inhabitants of roughly 1,300, and each have been evacuated Wednesday as the hearth, named the Twisp River Hearth, grew to roughly two sq. miles.

Lightning caused that fire, authorities said.

Wind and fire potential were expected to decrease across most of the region during the weekend.