150 more foreign firefighters due

A summary of regional wildfires:

Idaho

The National Interagency Fire Center said Friday that more firefighters from outside the country were on the way to help battle wildfires across the West, and a fire in a rugged area of central Idaho has flared up, prompting the closure of roads and campgrounds.

“There’s a lot of competition for resources,” said Rose Davis, a public affairs officer at the Boise-based center. “Most of our resources are committed to fires throughout the West.”

More than a dozen large fires are burning in Idaho, Davis said, and 25 more in Oregon, Washington and Montana. She said about 225 firefighters from Canada, New Zealand and Australia were serving as midlevel fire managers and on-the-line firefighters, and an additional 150 from those countries were expected in the next several days.

Davis said the last time foreign firefighters were called was 2003.

An additional 52 Idaho National Guard soldiers were being mobilized Friday and Saturday to man checkpoints to keep motorists from driving into dangerous fire areas.

Davis said three large Idaho fires were contained on Thursday. Two other large fires are being allowed to burn in wildland areas.

In central Idaho, the Trailhead Fire has flared up about 10 miles southwest of Stanley.

Washington

Thousands of firefighters battling a handful of large wildfires in Eastern Washington took advantage of favorable conditions Friday in advance of a forecast weekend return to hotter, drier weather.

A DC-10 jetliner capable of dropping as much as eight times more fire retardant than usual air tankers was used for the first time Friday after smoke cleared above the 66,000-acre – 103-square-mile – Columbia Complex of fires near Dayton, in southeastern Washington.

State Lands Commissioner Doug Sutherland arranged Thursday for the privately owned DC-10 to drop retardant on large fires at a cost of $26,000 per hour with a minimum of three hours per day. The plane can drop a line of retardant 50 feet wide and more than a mile long, he said.

A fire that burned through fields near Colfax was about 70 percent contained Friday because it was not being pushed by winds, said Glenn Johnson, Whitman County emergency services spokesman.

The fire destroyed a grain elevator and a train trestle and fire engines were stationed at two homes nearby as a precaution, but no other homes were in imminent danger, he said. At the Columbia Complex, about 50 miles southwest of Colfax, firefighters from Alaska joined others Friday from Arizona, Oregon and New Mexico battling the fires that have spread over huge areas of wheat stubble, wheat fields, grasslands, brush and timber near Dayton.

The main fire was burning within a mile of the city’s southwestern edge, but many of the 300 people who were evacuated were being allowed to return to their homes Friday, she said. The largest wildfire, the 210-square-mile Tripod Complex, was being fought by nearly 3,000 firefighters. It was about 45 percent contained on Friday.