Wildfire, Fire Season | featured news

Climate Central points out what should already be obvious: As it’s getting hotter, we’re seeing more wildfires — and the wildfires are getting bigger. Even as the 2012 wildfire season continues — there are nearly 1 million acres actively burning right now — the site parsed the data to pick out long-term trends linking fires, size, and heat. Here are some of the key findings from its report...

"The irony here is that the argument for setting these areas aside as national forests and parks was, to a large extent, to protect them from fire," Pyne says. "Instead, over time they became the major habitat for free-burning fire."

As hundreds of residents in Washington and California were allowed to return to homes once threatened by major wildfires, some people were told to evacuate as encroaching blazes neared Idaho towns.

Southern California wildfires are threatening dozens of homes after burning through more than 19 square miles of brush in the midst of a heat wave.

Crews made progress overnight against a Northern California wildfire that has grown to more than 4 1/2 square miles and forced the evacuation of hundreds of homes. The Wye Fire east of the community of Clearlake Oaks in Lake County was 25 percent contained early Monday morning. State fire officials say it is threatening 480 homes in Spring Valley and has already destroyed three structures. It was not immediately clear whether those were homes or outbuildings.

Christopher Carlson sprang into action when smoke and embers ushered a fire that threatened to envelop his Noble, Oklahoma, home. After taking his 12-year-old stepson to safety, Carlson raced against time to assist neighbors and try to save his trailer from one of more than a dozen wildfires that, as of Saturday, had destroyed more than 120 structures.

McCann, 19, was fleeing Colorado’s most destructive fire -- the Waldo Canyon fire -- when she lost control of her Subaru while trying to pass another vehicle on Interstate 84 between Boise and Mountain Home, Idaho. Her car went off the road and began burning -- starting another wildfire.

Ten thousand people in and around this mountain city remained under evacuation orders Saturday, a week after the Waldo Canyon fire erupted to become the most destructive in state history.

Making his descent from the mountaintop Thursday morning, bicyclist Kent Bell rolled smack into the filmy haze coating this resort town. Forty miles away, near Friday's finish line of the Ride the Rockies endurance test, one of the largest fires in Colorado history raged out of control.

One person was dead as massive wildfires in drought-parched Colorado and New Mexico burned out of control, while Western lawmakers pleaded for updates to an aging U.S. aerial firefighting fleet needed to combat a fire season that lasts year-round.