Firefighters are now battling 68 large fires nationwide, up by nearly two dozen from a day earlier. Some 17 new blazes broke out in the Pacific Northwest after a run of lightning strikes made it the most active fire region in the country, according to a summary from the National Interagency Fire Center.More than 17,400 personnel, 140 helicopters and four military C-130 air tanker crews are now deployed across the U.S. to battle wildfires, with record-low snowpack in the Mountain West and drought pushing fuel conditions to the type of dry and fire-prone levels normally not seen until mid-August, according to the NIFC.
Wildfire smoke blanketed the eastern U.S. from the Great Lakes to Washington, D.C. on Friday, floodwaters tore through Texas’s Hill Country for a third day, and new fires erupted in the Pacific Northwest overnight, with 68 large blazes now burning in 15 states.Millions of Americans faced hazardous conditions and orders to stay indoors, as the country’s summer weather extremes converged on three fronts at once: a smoke-choked East, rising water in the South, and fast-spreading flames in the West.
