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By Deborah Bloom and Sergio Olmos
KLAMATH FALLS, Ore. (Reuters) – A rapidly spreading wildfire raged through drought-dried wood and brush in south-central Oregon on Wednesday, threatening nearly 2,000 homes and displacing hundreds residents with few signs of slowing down, officials said.
The so-called Bootleg fire had blackened more than 212,000 acres (85,793 hectares) by morning, destroying 21 homes and 54 other structures, with firefighters managing to hack containment lines around just 5% of its perimeter, according to the reports. state and federal authorities.
Easily ranking as the largest of at least 10 active wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, the Bootleg has spread mostly unchecked in and around the Fremont-Winema National Forest, about 250 miles ( 400 km) south of Portland, since its eruption on July 6.
Flames threatened 1,926 homes on Wednesday, the North West Interagency Coordination Center in Portland reported. Nearly 400 of those homes have been evacuated, Oregon Forest Department officials said. No serious injuries or deaths were reported.
A thick veil of mist has settled over Klamath Falls to the southwest, where the local fairground has been transformed into a Red Cross evacuation center.
Tim McCarley, one of the evacuees, told Reuters earlier this week that sheriff’s deputies and state soldiers showed up to his home as “sparks and embers fell,” warning his family : “If you don’t go, you dead.”
“This is my first wildfire and I’ll tell you it’s scary,” said Sarah Kose, another evacuee. “You don’t know if you’re going to be the one to lose your house, or you just sit there and you watch your neighbor lose their house, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
More than 1,300 people have been assigned to fighting the wildfire, which is the seventh largest on record in Oregon since 1900, according to state forestry figures.
In comparison, two Oregon wildfires measured half a million acres or more – the 2012 Long Draw and the 2002 Biscuit. Only eight others, including the Bootleg, exceeded 200,000 acres, according to the records. .
Coming amid record-breaking temperatures in the West, the Bootleg fire was fueled by hot, dry and windy weather and parched vegetation by prolonged drought – a combination that accelerated the spread of the flames, officials said. .
A total of 60 large fires have consumed more than one million acres (404,680 hectares) in 12 states this season, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.
Last year dozens of late summer wildfires, many of which were sparked by dry lightning storms, killed more than three dozen people and charred more than 10.2 million acres (4.1 million hectares) in California, Oregon and Washington.
Earlier in the week, flames burned along a high-voltage electrical corridor connecting Oregon’s power grid to threatened California energy supplies, triggering energy-saving alerts on the California side. The alerts were withdrawn when the heatwave subsided.
(Reporting by Deborah Bloom in Klamath Falls and Sergio Olmos in Portland, Oregon; Additional reporting by Mathieu Louis-Rolland in Klamath County, Oregon and Peter Szekely in New York; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Richard Pullin and Leslie Adler)
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