By Laura Zuckerman - Aug 17, 2015
SALMON, Idaho - The U.S. Army began deploying 200 soldiers on Monday to reinforce civilian firefighters stretched thin by scores of large wildfires roaring across several Western states, marking the first such mobilization of active-duty military personnel in nine years.
The troops from Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Washington, are to be organized into 10 firefighting crews of 20 each, all of whom will be sent to a single fire that has yet to be determined, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.
Fire managers requested the mobilization, the first of its kind since 2006, as civilian crews from federal, state and local agencies struggled to contain many of the large wildfires that have charred more than 1 million acres of the West amid a heat wave gripping the drought-parched region.
Among the areas hardest hit was northern Idaho, where an elderly evacuee was killed and at least 50 homes were destroyed by a cluster of fires that have raged along the Clearwater River in and around the Nez Perce Indian Reservation since last week.
The so-called Clearwater Complex of fires has charred more than 50,000 acres of timber and brush and prompted the evacuation of more than 100 homes from the vicinity of the logging towns of Orofino and Kamiah, authorities said.
An elderly woman died on Friday night or early Saturday as flames hemmed in Kamiah on three sides, according to Idaho County Sheriff Doug Giddings. Cheryl Wissler, 70, was trying to secure her backyard chickens before fleeing with her husband when she fell and hit her head, Giddings said. An autopsy was planned.
Giddings said authorities, firefighters and residents have been taxed by multiple fires burning across an 8,500-square-mile county intersected by steep canyons and mountain forests crowded with pine and fir trees.
"There are very limited resources and fires everywhere," he said.
Ryan Greendeer, a spokesman for fire managers overseeing the Clearwater Complex, said that for the third day on Monday the team's requests for reinforcements of ground crews and aircraft had been returned with the initials "UTF," for "unable to fill."
"Because of the fire activity around the entire region, our resources are stretched very, very thin," he said. "Each incident is having to make do with what is available, not what's needed."
The Clearwater was one of 14 major wildfires burning across Idaho and one of about 95 tallied in seven Western states, the bulk of them in Washington, Oregon, Montana and California, the Interagency Fire Center said.
Little if any containment had been achieved for at least half of those blazes as of Monday, the agency reported, citing breezy conditions and unusually high temperatures persisting across much of the West.
About a dozen major fires burning in Oregon alone have scorched some 470 square miles and left at least 1,000 residents under evacuation.
In one of the fiercest of those conflagrations, hundreds of people were ordered from homes over the weekend in central Oregon, where a cluster of wildfires dubbed the Canyon Creek Complex destroyed 26 dwellings and continued to threaten hundreds of other structures, authorities said.