ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico – Thousands of firefighters continued to slow the advance of destructive wildfires in the Southwestern US but warned they were bracing for the return Friday of the same dangerous conditions that quickly spread the wind-fueled blazes a week ago.
At least 166 homes have been destroyed in one rural county in northeast New Mexico since the biggest fire currently burning in the US started racing through small towns east and northeast of Santa Fe on April 22, the local sheriff said.
Winds gusting up to 50 mph (80 kph) were forecast Friday in the drought-stricken region. One expert said it’s a recipe for disaster on the wildlands where some timber has a fuel moisture drier than kiln-dried wood.
“It´s a very, very dangerous fire day,” fire behavior specialist Stewart Turner said at a briefing according to AP on the edge of the Santa Fe National Forest in Las Vegas, New Mexico.
“Like we saw last Friday, epic fire behavior,” Turner said. “It’s a day that as a firefighter, we’ll write about, we’ll read studies about. It’s going to be a big fire day.”
A swath of the country stretching from Arizona to the Texas panhandle is expected to be hit the hardest by the return of the bad firefighting weather that has generated unusually hot and fast-moving fires for this time of year, forecasters warned.
Red flag warnings were in place for all of New Mexico and parts of Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma and Nebraska.
More than 3,000 firefighters were battling fires in Arizona and New Mexico on Thursday – about half of those in northeast New Mexico, where more than 187 square miles (484 square kilometers) of mostly timber and brush has been charred.
They focused Thursday on preventing it from moving into the rural New Mexico community of Ledoux. That meant bolstering fire lines and sending in crews tasked with protecting structures.
“Great progress again today,” incident commander Carl Schwope said Thursday night. But “tomorrow has the potential to be a very destructive day.”
“It will be chaotic if anything close to what happened (last) Friday occurs,” added operations chief Jayson Coil.
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