WASHINGTON, 25 June — US President George W. Bush was scheduled yesterday to declare a huge tract of fire-charred Arizona a federal disaster area, after two raging infernos merged, engulfing more than 300,000 acres and driving 30,000 people from their homes. The monster wildfire bore down on a town in the western US state of Arizona after two blazes merged Sunday into a giant fireball.
“This is the most out of control fire I’ve ever seen,” Arizona Gov. Jane Hull said after flying over the site Sunday. “This will be the most expensive fire that anyone has ever seen,” Hull said at a high school in the resort town of Show Low, as gray-brown smoke wafted overhead.
The largest single wildfire in the history of Arizona continued to rage out of control yesterday threatening to consume half a dozen small mountain towns. Show Low, the biggest of them, and whose 8,000 inhabitants were told to leave on Saturday evening, last night resembled a ghost town with its deserted silent streets. Looming over them to the west, obliterating the sky, was a huge orange and black cloud heralding the seemingly unstoppable advance of the giant blaze.
Desperate efforts had been under way by around 2,000 firefighters, backed up by tanker aircraft and helicopters, to prevent the two fires from joining up. The fires, with flames leaping 150 meters (500 feet) and igniting huge fireballs, have destroyed 115 homes and sparked the evacuation of six towns, forcing 30,000 people from their homes.
On Saturday terrified residents packed up trucks and cars, after the order to evacuate Show Low in the scenic White Mountains about 290 kilometers northeast of the major city of Phoenix. Most took only the bare essentials, stopping only to buy food and water at the local convenience store before fleeing to one of the many school gymnasiums sheltering evacuees.
As winds dropped, the fire’s progress did slow slightly, but hopes of saving Slow Low remained slim. “It’s abated a little but we’re still in a lot of danger here,” a firefighters’ spokesman said yesterday. “We think it’s an inevitability that the fire is going to enter Show Low.”
Already the wildfire has burned through parts of the evacuated towns of Linden, Pinedale, Clay Springs and Heber-Overgaard, while 3,500 residents of neighboring Pinetop-Lakeside left after the blaze leapt over a firebreak crews were building eight miles to the west.
The conflagration is the result of two separate fires which began last week and converged on Sunday to form a wall of flames some 50 miles long, fanned by hot high winds and fueled by the parched forest which drought has turned into a tinderbox. Thus far the blaze has consumed some 305,000 acres, or 480 square miles. (The Independent)
