A tanker plane crash kills a firefighter pilot in Oregon as wildfires spread across the West – Trentonian

By REBECCA BOONE and JOHN ANTCZAK

A tanker plane that went missing in eastern Oregon while fighting one of the numerous wildfires spreading across several western states has been found and the pilot on board is dead, authorities said Friday.

A Grant County search and rescue team located the plane Friday morning and confirmed the fatality, said Lisa Clark, a Bureau of Land Management information officer for the Falls Fire.

The single-pilot aircraft, commissioned by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, disappeared Thursday while battling one of the numerous wildfires spreading across several western states. The Falls Fire, near the town of Seneca on the edge of the Malheur National Forest, has spread to 220 square miles (567 square kilometers) and is 55 percent contained, according to the government website InciWeb.

Thomas Kyle-Milward, spokesman for Northwest Incident Management Team 8, said authorities received a report of a missing plane around 6:50 p.m. Thursday. The pilot was the only person on board.

Climate change is increasing the frequency of lightning strikes as the region suffers record-breaking heat and bone-dry conditions. More than 110 active fires were burning across 2,700 square miles (7,250 square kilometers) in the U.S. on Friday, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

In California, more than 130 buildings have been destroyed and thousands more are threatened by the state’s largest active wildfire. The Park Fire began Wednesday when a man pushed a burning car into a ravine in Chico and then calmly mingled with others fleeing the scene, authorities said.

Ronnie Dean Stout, 42, of Chico was arrested early Thursday and held without bail pending arraignment Monday, officials said. There was no immediate response to an email to the district attorney asking if the suspect had legal representation or someone who could comment on his behalf.

By Friday morning, the fire had gotten completely out of control after burning an area of ​​more than 666 square kilometers in the Sierra Nevada foothills above the city of 100,000 residents. About 4,000 residents in the unincorporated areas of Butte County and 400 residents of Chico were ordered to evacuate, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said late Thursday. Two minor injuries were reported, 134 buildings were destroyed and about 4,200 people were threatened.

“Due to dry fuels, hot weather, low humidity and wind, the fire soon outgrew our resources,” said Butte County Fire Chief Garrett Sjolund.

The Park Fire burned northwest of Paradise, the Butte County community where the infamous Camp Fire killed 85 people and incinerated thousands of homes in 2018. It became California’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire. Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said he wanted to “express his regret and frustration that we are here again.”

The greatest damage so far has been caused in Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, where a rapidly spreading forest fire forced 25,000 people to flee and devastated the park’s eponymous town, which is a World Heritage Site.

Oregon still has the largest active fire in the U.S., the Durkee Fire, which along with the Cow Fire has burned nearly 630 square miles. The fire remains unpredictable and was only 20 percent contained as of Friday, according to government website InciWeb.

In Idaho, lightning strikes sparked rapidly spreading wildfires that forced the evacuation of many communities. In one of those communities, a man drove past a building with trees ablaze and a tunnel of smoke rising above the road.

A man can be seen on social media saying he heard explosions as he fled Juliaetta, about 27 miles (43 kilometers) southeast of the University of Idaho campus in Moscow. The town of just over 600 residents was evacuated Thursday just before the raging fires, as were several other communities near the Clearwater River and the Nez Perce Tribal Hatchery Complex, which raises salmon to supplement dwindling stocks of the keystone species.

“This series of fires is a difficult one,” said Robbie Johnson, spokesman for the Idaho Department of Lands. “We’re using everything we have — if there are more fires in an area, you have to say, ‘You need planes over here and over there,’ and you have to make those difficult decisions about attack. There are really smart people working on that.”

There are no estimates yet of the number of buildings burned in Idaho and no information on the damage in urban areas, Johnson said Friday morning.

Elsewhere in California, about 1,000 people were forced to evacuate their homes Thursday as the lightning-sparked Gold Complex fires burned nearly 4.5 square miles (12 square kilometers) of brush and forest in California’s Plumas National Forest, near the Nevada border and about 50 miles (80 kilometers) northwest of Reno. Some evacuations were lifted Friday when the fire was 11% contained.

And in inland Southern California, firefighters battled a small blaze that broke out Thursday afternoon in hills above the Riverside County town of Lake Elsinore. The Macy Fire was 15% contained early Friday, with one unspecified building destroyed. In rural northern San Diego County, containment of the three-day-old Grove Fire rose to 25% after a day of minimal spread.

The National Interagency Fire Center said more than 27,000 fires in the United States have burned a total of more than 15,000 square kilometers this year, and in Canada more than 3,700 fires have burned more than 22,800 square kilometers so far, according to the National Wildland Fire Situation Report released Wednesday.

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Associated Press writers Holly Ramer, Sarah Brumfield, Claire Rush, Scott Sonner, Martha Bellisle and Amy Hanson contributed to this report.