Irkutsk - Firefighters in Russia's Siberia had extinguished 45 forest fires covering 522 hectares of forest in the past 24 hours, but 131 wildfires were still burning on the area of almost 15,000 hectares, the regional forestry department said Friday.

A total of 29 wildfires covering an area of more than 5,000 hectares were localized, and 14,948 hectares of forest continued to burn in the Krasnoyarsk Krai, Tomsk Region, Tuva, Khakassia and Irkutsk Region.

Some 3,000 people, 412 units of fire-fighting equipment and 24 aircrafts have been mobilized to fight the blazes, which are believed to be caused by hot and dry weather in the region where the temperature reaches 35 degrees.

Reports said the wildfires posed no threat to populated areas or industry.

Almost 180 forest fires are raging across Russia, head of the North Western Federal District Forest Department Andrei Karpilovich told a Monday press conference in St. Petersburg. "A total of 100 forest fires were put out on 17,300 hectares in Russia over the past day," he said, referring to data from regional forest authorities.

"In all, Russia has had 15,710 forest fires this season. The rate is practically unchanged since last year. The fires passed through 1.283 million hectares or 138,000 hectares less than last year," Karpilovich said. Eleven constituents of the Russian Federation announced fire emergency situations, he noted. The biggest number of wildfires was reported from Komi and the Arkhangelsk region, while the Kaliningrad region did not have any, he said.

In turn, Leningrad Regional Committee on Natural Resources Chairman Alexei Eglit said that the total number of wildfires in the Leningrad region had been declining over the past decade. "The human factor is always the main cause of forest fires. In the past four to five years people's awareness has grown. We have much less fires now than a decade ago," he said.
Source: Interfax

High winds fan flames and hamper firefighters' efforts in the Costa Brava tourist haven close to the French border

Three people have died after forest fires broke out in Girona province, north-east Spain.

The area in Catalonia is close to the French border and home to one of the most popular beach destinations in Spain, the Costa Brava.

Strong winds hindered firefighters' efforts on Sunday and have so far spread two fires over 13,000 hectares (22,000 acres).

A man and his 15-year-old daughter were killed after jumping off a cliff to escape the flames, while a third person died of a heart attack. El País newspaper said 19 people had been injured.

About 80km (50 miles) of roads have been cut off in the area, a big artery for holidaymakers making their way to and from southern France in the coastal province. Residents were being told to stay at home, while the winds were pushing the fires towards Figueres, a town of around 50,000 people.

Crews battle western Idaho fire near U.S. Highway 95

Horseshoe Bend, Idaho - Authorities say U.S. Highway 95 has been reduced to one lane near Midvale as crews battle a 600-acre wildfire in western Idaho.

The Roadside Fire started early Friday and the cause has not yet been determined.

Denise Cobb with the Payette National Forest says the fire is burning on a mix of private, state, and federal land within the forest's protection zone. Officials reported just before 2 p.m. that the blaze had crossed Sage Creek and was heading northwest.

To the south, firefighters said a brush fire that burned 100 acres near Highway 55 outside of Horseshoe Bend had been contained. The Summit Ridge Fire ignited Thursday afternoon and forced the evacuation of more than 10 homes.

Spanish authorities evacuated a town of 1,800 residents on the Canary Islands on Tuesday, after three days of firefighting efforts failed to prevent a raging wildfire from reaching it.

Residents were evacuating from the town of Vilaflor, south of the Teide national park that spans the centre of the Spanish island of Tenerife, as flames reached parts of the town.

Emergency services "are evacuating residents from Vilaflor due to the advance of the fire from the east," the regional government said in a statement Tuesday evening.

A wildfire burning in a steep canyon between the towns of Colfax and Foresthill in Placer County, Calif., destroyed one home, threatened 170 more and injured nine firefighters, the Los Angeles Times reported, citing fire officials.

Cal[ifornia] Fire officials said Saturday that the Robbers Fire has burned 1,950 acres since igniting Wednesday afternoon, and was 20 percent contained. More than 1,900 firefighters are fighting the fire.

Gov. Jerry Brown on Friday called in more firefighters and the California National Guard to help battle the fire.

Officials said they fire had moved into a rural subdivision Saturday evening known as Brushy Canyon, and three strike teams were being deployed to protect homes in the area, NBC station KCRA reported.

The area is in Placer County, west of Lake Tahoe.

Ken Pimlott, the state fire director, said a two-year reprieve from wildfires in the region appears to be over.

"The exceptionally dry winter has set the stage for a more active fire season this year, and we're seeing fire activity now that we would typically not see until late August," he said in a statement.

This article includes reporting by NBC station KCRA of Sacramento and The Associated Press.

'We're going to run out of grass. It's shaping up to be scary,' says expert
It took less than an hour last month for a Montana wildfire to reduce Scott McRae's ranch to thousands of blackened acres devoid of the grasses that were to sustain hundreds of cattle.

"That is 500 mouths to feed with nothing to eat in sight," said McRae, 53, co-owner of a family ranch founded in the 1880s in southeastern Montana.

McRae is among scores of ranchers across the West whose grazing lands have been charred by blazes or ravaged by drought amid a regional shortfall of the alfalfa hay that could stave off starvation.

With drought affecting more than half the contiguous United States and less than a quarter of the nation's pasture and range rated good to excellent, cattle producers from Montana to Nevada are bracing for a rough season.

While some ranchers like McRae use private lands for grazing, many others pay modest fees to graze herds on acreage managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service under decades-old laws governing grazing on the West's vast federal lands.

Denver (Reuters) - Investigators probing the cause of the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history have located the point of ignition but have not concluded how the blaze started, officials said on Thursday.

At its height, the 12-day-old blaze forced the evacuation of some 35,000 people in and around Colorado Springs, the state's second most populous city, and threatened the campus of the U.S. Air Force Academy before fire crews gained an upper hand late last week. It destroyed more than 300 homes and killed two people.

Since it was first reported on June 23, the blaze has burned more than 14,000 acres of drought-parched timber and brush, mostly in the Pike National Forest about 50 miles south of the Denver metropolitan area. But as of Thursday, ground crews had managed to carve containment lines around 90 percent of the fire's perimeter, said incident commander Rich Harvey.

Harvey said he anticipates full containment by late in the week as crews work to extinguish flames in a few stubborn areas. "When there's been no smoke visible and no heat detected for 24 hours, we'll be comfortable there will be no further growth and we'll call it 100 percent contained," Harvey said.

Dozens of wildfires are raging around the western United States, and the large-scale burns are sending smoke as far east as Greenland, according to some atmospheric models.

In all, about 60 wildfires are burning around the nation, from Alaska to Utah to Florida, and satellite images show hazy curtains of smoke hanging over huge portions of the eastern two-thirds of the country.

Smoke travels well, said Georg Grell, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Earth System Research Lab in Boulder, Colo.

The hotter the fire, the higher its smoke can go - and the higher the smoke goes into the atmosphere, the farther it typically travels, Grell told OurAmazingPlanet.

"The winds are much stronger up there, so it gets transported much quicker," he said. In addition, once smoke gets to certain altitudes, it's less likely to be washed out of the air by rainstorms, Grell said.

Smoke from extremely hot wildfires can rise 4 to 5 miles (7 to 8 kilometers) into the atmosphere, and can even trigger massive thunderstorms, but it's likely that the smoke from the recent spate of fires is hanging out about 1 mile (1.5 km) above the ground.

Over the past 18 months, we've been growing increasingly concerned for the future of all life on planet earth. Sure, the signs that things have been going 'south' have been there for some time, but our concern began in earnest at the very beginning of 2011, when masses of birds began to fall dead from the sky around the world. The phenomenon continued for several months, and birds around the world are still dying for officially unknown reasons. None of the dead birds showed any sign of disease, but in several incidents birds were found to have 'external injuries' like they had been "hit by some kind of blunt instrument". All sorts of explanations for the deaths were offered (like fireworks or birds colliding with each other) including the predictable attempts by 'science experts' to downplay any significance to the bizarre deaths. But among the flurry of speculation, one report stood out.

NewsChannel5 Chief Meteorologist Mark Johnson decided to take a look at the the Doppler radar images from Beebe, Arkansas from the night when many red-winged blackbirds had fallen dead to the ground, and he discovered something interesting.

"There it was. This huge plume of turbulence over the Beebe birds just as they began their frenzied flight," Johnson said.

The turbulence appears above the birds between about 7,000 and 12,000 feet. Johnson realized there are only a few possible explanations for this phenomena.

Having homed in on the probable cause, Johnson then introduced some nonsense:

"Birds don't fly that high, and he quickly ruled out military action, a sonic boom, meteor shower or alien invasion."

While we can understand why Johnson ruled out military action or a sonic boom (there were no flights over the area at the time), Johnson never explained why he ruled out a "meteor shower", although we can understand the inclusion of "alien invasion" - to ridicule by association the idea of a "meteor shower" or other meteorite-related phenomenon.

Johnson then went on to say:

"Something in the atmosphere, something mysterious, occurred over Beebe, Arkansas that night... And I believe it was part of what caused those birds to fly and then die."

Indeed, but with the answer staring him in the face, Johnson lost the plot completely:

Johnson's research captured an unseen temperature reversal just above the birds' roosting area at about 1,500 feet above the ground. This temperature "inversion" acted like a megaphone, amplifying all the noises that occurred in Beebe at that time. As the fireworks exploded, the sound was amplified by the inversion and became much louder than normal. This appears to have startled the birds so much that they burst into flight, running into each other, and nearby buildings. Thousands of the now-disoriented birds then crashed to the ground, dying from blunt force trauma.

Temperature reversal? At 1,500 feet? But previously Johnson stated that the 'turbulence' occurred between 7,000 and 12,000 feet. He even produced a graph of the Doppler radar images that shows this. While temperature inversion does occur and can amplify sound, when birds are startled by noise they don't generally fly into each other and buildings in large numbers. What's most likely, is that the bird deaths of January 2011 (and later) were caused by an overhead meteorite or comet fragment (MoCF) explosion, with either the actual shock wave killing the birds (through blunt force trauma) or associated electrical effects 'frying' their 'circuits'.

This electrical effect can also explain the massive fish die-offs around the same time. Consider this report, just in today, about two children being mysteriously electrocuted to death as they swam in a lake in Missouri on 4th July. The thousands of dead fish found upstream from Beebe on New Year's Eve 2010 could well have had their circuits fried because of significant electrical discharge that accompanied the overhead MoCF airburst. Now check out this Tunguska blast simulation by Sandia lab. An incoming bolide exploding overhead would knock the wind out of anything within a radius relative to the extent of its blast. It would probably knock airplanes out of the sky too - more on that below.