FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

The Current Pacific-Northwest Wildfire Map is Fucking Terrifying

And it only keeps getting worse.
Image: Bureau of Land Management

The wildfire situation in Washington state was already bad enough with a still-burning rash of fires triggered en masse last weekend or even earlier, but the total acreage of burning land has doubled just over the past 24 hours, to nearly 120,000 acres.

On Friday, President Obama declared a state of emergency, opening up the federal relief fund taps, and formalizing the state's fire situation as a real shitstorm. On Wednesday, three firefighters died when their vehicle crashed and was overrun by flames. Four more were injured, one critically, as they attempted to escape on foot.

Advertisement

The recent explosion in activity is still being assessed. The fire responsible for the deaths above grew just overnight by 100 square miles to around 250 square miles, leaving an increasingly chaotic scene in which authorities can't even begin to estimate how many homes and other structures have been lost: "We have lost them, but I don't know how many," Okanogan County Sheriff Frank Rogers told reporters. Even the Okanogan fire response's operational base-camp has been told to prepare for evacuation, according to the Seattle PI.

As fire managers are being recruited from Australia and New Zealand, local authorities have begun reviewing offers from civilians interested in assisting in fighting the blazes as volunteers, an unprecedented step.

Meanwhile, in eastern Oregon, a new blaze threatening homes near Prairie City has diverted firefighting resources away from the nearby Canyon Creek fire, which itself has managed to be the most destructive in state history. There are simply no more personnel to spare. "The pipeline is empty," Oregon State Forester Doug Decker told the Oregonian. "We cannot suffer another fire in Oregon right now."

Conditions, however, remain primed for fire. Red flag warnings are in place through the weekend across much of the two states, indicating unusually extreme conditions for fires to erupt and grow.