St. George, Utah – Firefighters battled in hot, dry and windy weather Sunday to contain wildfires that have prompted evacuations, closed part of a major highway and shrouded much of southwest Utah in a dark, smoky haze.
Officials said the blaze about 20 miles north of St. George grew from 2,000 acres to 8,000 acres in less than 12 hours and by late Sunday was within 5 miles of New Harmony.
“That’s going to be our nightmare,” said fire commander Taiga Rohrer, watching plumes of smoke billowing off the Black Ridge Mountains, about 280 miles south of Salt Lake City.
As Lea Twitchell and her family prepared to evacuate their New Harmony home, her thoughts were with her son Luke, a firefighter for the Bureau of Land Management fighting the blaze.
“He just started on that crew, and I’m a little nervous because we haven’t heard from him,” she said Sunday.
She said smoke and ash had already built up a layer on their cars.
“It’s a little bit irritating to breathe,” Twitchell said.
The fire was started Saturday by lightning strikes and at one point jumped Interstate 15, forcing state officials to close a segment of the highway, the major route between Salt Lake City and Las Vegas.
The interstate reopened Sunday morning but was later closed again while fire crews burned an 8- to 10-mile swath of land adjacent to the highway to prevent the fire from jumping the road again.
The fire was fueled by temperatures in the high 90s, wind gusts of 25 mph and low humidity.
Elsewhere, firefighters struggled to extinguish blazes in California, Arizona, Nevada, Alaska and Washington state that have consumed more than 350,000 acres.
