BOULDER, Colorado – Will Esposito describes an otherworldly scene after a wildfire tore through a canyon in the Colorado foothills: Some houses in his neighborhood burning while others stood intact, a propane tank shooting flames into the sky, and an eerie quiet interrupted only by firefighting helicopters and airplanes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"There was something majestic and beautiful about it, although it’s terrible that some people lost their homes," Esposito said after he took a clandestine tour on Tuesday.

The 11-square-mile catastrophic blaze had destroyed at least 92 structures and damaged at least eight others by Tuesday night, Boulder County sheriff’s Cmdr. Rick Brough said.

A partial list of property destroyed contained the addresses of 53 homes on a government website Tuesday night. The list was based on a survey of only 5 to 10 percent of the burned area.

No injuries have been reported since the fire broke out on Monday. Officials say the cause is still under investigation.

Authorities said about 3,500 people have been evacuated from about 1,000 homes. Esposito said deputies told him to leave at about 4 p.m. Monday, but he stayed behind to watch, finally driving to Boulder at about 9 p.m.

"It was very desolate. Everybody cleared out," he said. "No one was around at all."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Tuesday, state troopers blocked roads leading into the evacuation area, letting only firefighters in. Esposito — frustrated by the scant information officials have offered about the destruction — took his mountain bike to a trailhead and rode back in to his neighborhood to see for himself.

"It sends chills through your body a little bit," he said of the scene.

Esposito saw three homes burning on Monday and three more on Tuesday, but his own was unscathed.

"It was very pocketed. Some areas were severely burned and some were not (burned) at all," he said.

Esposito, 27, who works as a bartender in Boulder, said he never felt in danger and kept clear lines of escape in view at all times.

"I never felt foolhardy," he said.

Gov. Bill Ritter, who declared a state of emergency on Tuesday, pleaded with residents to be patient and not try to get back into the area until firefighters tell them it’s safe. Brough said that could be two days away.

"It’s important right now for people who have been evacuated to just be patient. This is a very volatile situation," the governor said after touring the area. His disaster declaration released $5 million to fight the blaze.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Between 300 and 400 firefighters were on the ground Tuesday and more were arriving, said Laura McConnell, a spokeswoman for the incident management team. Aerial tankers and helicopters dumped thousands of gallons of fire retardant and water in the fire’s path, but McConnell had no specifics.

Crews managed to save the historic town of Gold Hill, including an Old West grocery store and structures once used for stagecoach stops.

Though westerly dry winds that spread the blaze Monday had eased Tuesday, authorities would not say whether fire lines had been established or speak about the prospect of containing the fire.

"There’s no information about anything. … I am so frustrated," said Ronda Plywaski, who fled her home with her husband and their two German shepherds and spent the night at an evacuation center at the University of Colorado. "I just want to know if my house is OK."

Authorities were trying to figure out what caused a failure in an alert system designed to automatically call the homes of residents under evacuation orders. Officials said the system successfully sent out eight rounds of calls but failed on two.

Barb Halpin, a Boulder County spokeswoman, said the failures happened later in the afternoon when other areas outside the immediate vicinity of the fire were being alerted.

"It’s unfortunate that those callouts failed," Halpin said. "We don’t know the reason. Obviously, we’re investigating," she said.

Halpin said that sheriff’s deputies went to the areas where the notifications failed to knock on people’s doors and tell them to evacuate.

Residents gathered Tuesday at a mountain overlook to watch the yellowish-brown haze. One of them, Kirk Parker, sipped a beer on the tailgate of his Nissan pickup and spotted the roof of his home with binoculars. It wasn’t on fire.

"I think we’re safe," Parker said.

David Myers started hearing from people Tuesday afternoon that they think his house was destroyed. He said while he’s sure he will experience "a varied level of emotions" about losing it, he remembers how he felt when fleeing the wildfire.

"All that really matters to us was my wife and I getting each other, getting the dogs, and getting out of there," Myers said. "We grabbed a couple of things, but when we look around, and we go, ‘What should I take?’ it all seems pretty irrelevant."

 

Moscow, Russia – Concentration of carbon monoxide in Moscow’s air has abated, however may slightly increase in the evening, an expert from the State Environmental Protection Organization Mosekomonitoring said on Tuesday.

 

“Currently, the concentration of carbon monoxide in Moscow is within the norm,” she said.

Rain in several of Moscow’s districts has helped disperse the smog that has been suffocating Muscovites over the last few days.

“But there is a probability that the concentration of harmful substances will slightly rise by evening,” she added.

VORONEZH, Russia – Hundreds of new fires broke out Sunday in Russian forests and fields that have been dried to a crisp by drought and record heat. Firefighters brought some of the wildfires raging around cities under control, getting much-needed help from residents desperate to save their homes, who shoveled sand onto the flames and carted water in large plastic bottles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The wildfires that began threatening much of western Russia last week have killed 28 people and destroyed or damaged 77 towns or villages, the Emergencies Ministry said. Thousands of people have been evacuated from areas in the path of flames, but no deaths have been recorded since late Wednesday.

Army troops and volunteers have joined more than 22,000 firefighters in combating the fires, which blazed just outside Moscow and in several provinces east and south of the capital.

The region around Voronezh, a city of 850,000 people about 300 miles (475 kilometers) south of Moscow, has been one of the worst hit. Half of the 300 homes in the village of Maslovka were reduced to cinders.

Emergencies Ministry spokeswoman Yelena Chernova said fires in the Voronezh region were under control Sunday and no longer threatened any population centers.

But woodlands on the edge of the city, about a mile (1.5 kilometers) from some houses, continued to burn. Firefighters dumped water on the blaze from the air, while local residents pitched in on the ground.

New fires were breaking out elsewhere in Russia. Of the 774 fires burning Sunday, 369 had started in the past 24 hours. More than 300,000 acres (128,000 hectares) were ablaze, including in the regions around Nizhny Novgorod, Russia’s fifth-largest city, and the city of Ryazan, just southeast of Moscow. The fires also were intensifying in regions farther to the east such as Mordovia and Tatarstan.

Smokey air has settled over cities, already baking in the heat, and many residents complain of headaches and intestinal ailments. In Moscow, the smog has come mainly from fires in dried-up peat bogs in outlying regions. The peat, which is high in carbon, can ignite and smolder underground, giving off dangerous fumes.

Much of western and central Russia is suffering through a severe drought, thought to be the worst since 1972, in what has been the hottest summer since record-keeping began 130 years ago. This year’s harvest was already in trouble, and the fires have finished off vast fields of golden wheat and other crops.

Temperatures have topped 95 degrees (35 Celsius) for much of the past three weeks, with an all-time high of close to 100 degrees (38 Celsius) recorded in Moscow last week.

Emergency officials said the heat and drought were the main cause of the fires, but they also blamed human carelessness and urged people to use extreme caution when walking or driving in the woods or countryside.

"Any source of fire, including a cigarette thrown from a car window, will ignite the dried grass," the emergency services said in a statement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The blaze in northern L.A. County has forced the evacuation of 300 homes. Wind gusts of up to 50 mph were making the fight difficult. The governor visited the site Friday. Firefighters launched an aerial assault Friday as part of a stepped-up campaign to tame a wind-driven wildfire that has consumed more than 13,000 acres in Los Angeles County’s High Desert, threatening hundreds of homes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Crown fire forced the evacuation of 300 homes and destroyed several structures. At one point, the fire jumped the California Aqueduct and was bearing down on homes in the Rancho Vista subdivision in western Palmdale but was quickly diverted. More than 1,700 fighters, assisted by five water-dropping helicopters and a DC-10 aircraft, used to drop fire retardant, helped bring the Leona Valley fire to 20% containment by late Friday, officials said. A 747 tanker was also deployed to help battle the blaze.

"Public safety is our No. 1 priority, and the faster we jump into action the better it is," Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told reporters after being briefed by fire officials during a visit to the site. "We are deploying everything that we’ve got." Schwarzenegger said several fires were raging around the state and that a total of 30,000 acres had been burned so far and 34 structures destroyed. In L.A. County, the Briggs fire, which burned more than 350 acres south of the 14 Freeway at Indian Canyon Truck Trail and Briggs Road, had been brought under control by Friday. A third fire near Gorman burned about 30 acres Thursday before it was extinguished.

In neighboring Kern County, cooler temperatures helped firefighters contain two wildfires that had burned more than 17,000 acres and destroyed dozens of structures in remote mountain communities earlier in the week.

Fire officials said their strategy on the Crown fire, which broke out late Thursday afternoon, was to contain the fire and keep it from spreading but that winds gusts of up to 50 mph were making it difficult. The air was bone dry, and temperatures had soared into the high 90s. "It is very difficult to limit growth when Mother Nature is not cooperating," said Deputy Chief Michael Bryant of the L.A. County Fire Department.

Three trailers, a single-family home and two garages were destroyed on the Lazy T Ranch in the Leona Valley, fire officials said. Near Lake Elizabeth Road, one house had roof damage, and three out-buildings and a hay barn were destroyed. Residents of a housing development on Elizabeth Lake Road were being asked to stay put as firefighters formed a containment perimeter around them, authorities said.

A top priority for firefighters was to protect power lines throughout the area that bring electricity to much of Southern California, Bryant said. He noted that some communication infrastructure, such as antennas and electronic repeater dishes, had been damaged, but this had not hampered the communication capabilities for battling the blaze, he said.

The L.A. Department of Water and Power requested that residents reduce their energy usage wherever possible. "We’re asking people to help care for our infrastructure while this fire is burning, as we wait for the potential threat to diminish," said Brooks Baker, a spokesman for the agency.

Officials said the agency minimized power imports Friday on a transmission line that passes through the Leona Valley and began generating power at closer power plants to deliver energy to the city. Brooks said there were no fire-related outages Friday. A small number of Southern California Edison customers were less lucky.

With "multiple" transmission and distribution lines threatened, Edison officials said 21 customers were without service in Lancaster, most of them south of Elizabeth Lake Road. Those customers had been without power since late Thursday afternoon, and it was unclear when service would be restored.

The cause of the Crown fire has not been determined. But the investigation into its origin focuses on a vacant lot where workers were apparently using a hammer to extract bolts from tire rims, according to Bryant. No illegal activity appeared to be involved, and workers involved were cooperating with fire and law enforcement officials, he said.

 

 

A fire in a hotel in northern Iraq has killed 29 people and left at least 40 wounded, hospital administrators say. The fire spread through the Soma Hotel in Suleimaniya during the night, killing women, children and foreigners. Some died jumping from their windows to escape the flames, which broke out late on Thursday, witnesses said.

 

City officials said it was likely that the fire was started by an electrical fault, with no indication that it was a result of a terror attack. It was seven hours before the blaze was brought under control, officials told reporters. "I saw three people jump from their floor to escape the fire, but they were killed when they hit the ground," Kameran Ahmed, who owns an electrical supply shop next to the hotel, told reporters.
At least four children were killed, the Associated Press quoted local chief of police Brig Gen Najim al-Din Qadir as saying. Hospital officials told the AFP news agency that four Americans were among the dead. Also reportedly killed in the fire were engineers from Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Ethiopia, the Philippines, and at least one Canadian. Some of the firefighters battling the fire were also injured by smoke inhalation. Suleimaniya, 160 miles (260 km) north-east of Baghdad, is a commercial hub of northern Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous area, a major site for oil exploration. It is thought that some of the dead work for international oil companies working in the region.