'Extreme' wildfires and heavy smoke grip western US and Canada; Guv declares emergency

The western United States and Canada had a horrendous start to the season as a major Oregon fire erupted in dry, windy conditions, while a new California blaze threatened communities ravaged by the 2018 Camp Fire. As the region reels from the consequences of recurrent heat waves that experts say have been exacerbated by global warming, wildfire officials upgraded their preparedness level to the highest tier for the first time in a decade, and Canada's military joined evacuation operations. 

Fire is going to continue because of dry vegetation 

Joe Hessel, who is commanding a team battling Oregon's 227,000-acre Bootleg Fire believes that the fire is going to continue to spread as the extremely dry vegetation and weather are not in their favour. The Bootleg Fire, 250 miles south of Portland, is the largest active inferno in the US, burning through the equivalent of 130,000 soccer fields and blanketing sections of neighbouring Washington and Idaho with heavy smoke visible from space. 

Firefighters from as far away as San Francisco have been ordered to battle the large conflagration, which is displaying 'exceptional' development due to drought-affected brush and hot, dry, and breezy conditions.

The governor of Montana declared a wildfire emergency

It started over a week ago and is just 7% contained, destroying 21 homes and threatening over 2,000 more. The blaze is one of roughly 70 big fires that have burned over one million acres in the United States alone. The governor of Montana's northern state declared a nationwide wildfire emergency on Wednesday.

In California, the freshly sparked Dixie Fire is ripping across territory near Paradise, which was burned by the horrific 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 86 people and was the state's deadliest in modern history. 

The Dixie Fire grew by a factor of two overnight and was still uncontained, although it was moving away from inhabited areas like Paradise. The considerably larger Beckwourth Complex, a combination of two blazes ignited by lightning last week, exceeded 100,000 acres in California on Thursday.

Smoke from forest fires has caused air quality advisories in numerous locations of British Columbia. The province had 309 fires as of Thursday afternoon, 23 of which had begun in the previous two days. Heatwaves that hit the western United States and Canada in late June would have been nearly impossible without human-caused climate change, according to scientists.

Image- @ForestServiceNW/Twitter