Colorado Fires Flare, Tankers Grounded
Fires burning in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah have charred nearly 500,000 acres of tinder-dry forest and brush forcing thousands to flee and destroying more than 60 homes, most of them in Colorado.
On Tuesday, America's C-130A air tankers, workhorse of the firefighting fleet, were grounded in the midst of what could become one of the worst fire seasons in history after a plane lost its wings and nose-dived in Northern California on Monday, killing all three people aboard. An investigation continues into why the tankers' wings snapped off.
The air tanker was repaired four years ago for cracks in one wing, a representative of the plane's owner, Hawkins & Powers Aviation Inc., said Tuesday night.
The damage was repaired and no subsequent problems were reported, Diane Nuttall, an administrative assistant at Hawkins & Powers in Greybull, Wyoming, said Tuesday night. She did not know when the repair work was done.
The news came as a huge wildfire flared in Colorado, racing across 7,000 acres on Tuesday. By evening, the fire was burning across an estimated 120,000 acres of wooded hills southwest of Denver, forcing about 2,000 more people to evacuate their homes.
One of the firefighters' newest priorities are wildfires in southern Colorado near Durango, reports CBS News Correspondent Mark Strassmann. Fires there have consumed more than 44,000 acres.
In all, federal forest officials say more than 1.5 million acres have burned across the country in 2002 — nearly twice the 10-year average for this time of year.
Other fires burning around the country included a 100,000-acre blaze in Alaska's interior. It was started May 22 by firecracker shotgun shells fired by a biologist to scare off a charging moose.
The temporary grounding of C-130A tanker planes comes after a crash killed three firefighters Monday near Walker, California.
The C-130A had just completed a pass over a fire in the Sierra Nevada range when its wings snapped off and the fuselage plunged to the ground, bursting into a ball of flame.
A few hours before the crash, three firefighters in Southern California were burned when flames leaped over their fire truck parked near Interstate 15. They were expected to be released from the hospital by Wednesday, shaken by the experience.
In Arizona, a fire near Nogales on the Mexican border is nearly contained, officials fighting the blaze said. Operations are being slimmed down on the nearly 16,400-acre Walker fire, with the team that had been managing the fire handing off Tuesday night to a smaller incident management team, before reverting back to the local ranger district of the Coronado National Forest.
In Colorado, a U.S. Forest Service worker's claim that she accidentally started a 120,000-acre wildfire while burning a letter from her estranged husband has drawn a skeptical response from prosecutors. Jeff Dorschner, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney John Suthers, expressed doubts about the worker's revised story.