Emergency officials on Friday extended evacuation orders to additional towns threatened by a deadly array of wildfires in north-central Washington state as dozens of blazes swirled across the drought-parched Pacific Northwest and surrounding regions.
US President Barack Obama signed a US federal declaration of emergency for Washington state, authorizing the US Department of Homeland Security and the US Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate relief efforts in 11 counties and several Indian reservations hard hit by wildfires.
Authorities late on Thursday ordered the population of Tonasket, a riverfront hamlet of about 1,000 residents just 40km south of the Canadian border, to flee their homes as flames closed in.
Photo: AP
About 40km farther south along the same river, emergency officials early on Friday issued additional evacuation orders for parts of Okanogan, a larger town at the western edge of the Colville Indian Reservation, urging evacuees in a Facebook posting “not to wait for door-to-door notification.”
Both communities were in the path of flames from a cluster of wildfires dubbed the Okanogan Complex, which has doubled in size since Thursday to scorch about 65,154 hectares of brush and dry timber about 185 km northeast of Seattle.
The Okanogan Complex includes the so-called Twisp River fire, which killed three firefighters and injured four others on Wednesday night after forcing the evacuation of about 4,000 households in the towns of Twisp and Winthrop about 48km west of Okanogan in the foothills of the Cascades.
Further evacuations were ordered on Friday around Nespelem, a tiny settlement in the interior of the Colville Reservation, where homes and businesses were threatened by a separate blaze that has blackened about 35,600 hectares of tribal lands.
At least 70 large wildfires have been raging since last week through several bone-dry Western states, the bulk of them in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California and Montana, the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, reported.
More than 100 homes and dozens of outbuildings have been lost, but only one civilian death has been reported in the latest rash of fires — a 70-year-old woman who slipped and fell as she was securing her backyard chickens before fleeing her Idaho home last weekend.
Smoke and soot carried hundreds of kilometers by prevailing winds from the Northwest to the Rockies settled over parts of Colorado, prompting a “wildfire smoke health advisory” that urged elderly residents, young children and people with respiratory ailments to stay indoors.
The advisory was posted on Friday for Denver and the entire the northern tier of Colorado, from the Utah line to the Kansas border.
The Western blazes, under attack by more than 30,000 firefighters and support personnel, have collectively charred more than 405,000 hectares of landscape in the midst of frequent dry-lightning strikes and a heat wave gripping the region.
With manpower and other resources stretched thin, fire managers have turned to the US Army, the National Guard and even personnel from Canada, Australia and New Zealand to furnish reinforcements.
So far this year, US wildfires have claimed the lives of at least 13 firefighters, four more than died in the line of duty during all of last year, the fire center said.
This year, wildfires nationwide have scorched nearly 2.9 million hectares, or 29,500km2, an area equivalent to the combined land mass of Vermont and Delaware.
That tally, exceeding the annual 10-year average for the past decade by 890,000 hectares, has already cost the federal government more than US$1 billion in fire suppression, according to the fire agency.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to