The Incident
Three firefighters were killed and two others burned on Saturday while battling the Knowles and Gore fires along the Colorado-Utah border, the U.S. Wildland Fire Service announced. The five crew members were part of an interagency response involving the Wildland Fire Service and U.S. Forest Service when they were suddenly overwhelmed by flames during what officials call a "burnover incident." In such events, fire spreads so rapidly that it cuts off escape routes, forcing trapped firefighters to deploy emergency shelter tents as a last resort. The two survivors were hospitalized with burn injuries.
The burnover occurred in Mesa County, Colorado, where temperatures had reached 93 degrees Fahrenheit with wind gusts of 44 miles per hour, according to the National Weather Service. Alyssa Mason, a spokesperson for the Cottonwood Fire, told reporters that crews were dealing with single-digit humidity and fuel moisture readings between 2 and 8 percent. Those extreme conditions grounded helicopters and other firefighting aircraft on Friday afternoon and again briefly on Saturday.
Conditions Fueling the Fires
The fires are spreading across a region gripped by historic drought. Utah recorded its lowest snowpack and warmest winter on record this past season, with the snowpack peaking three weeks earlier than normal. This left soils and vegetation to dry out through spring, creating ideal conditions for rapid fire spread. Nearly 3 million acres have burned across the country since the start of the year, exceeding the 10-year average.
The Cottonwood Fire, the largest active blaze in the United States, grew from about 70,000 acres to more than 92,000 acres by Saturday morning and was 0 percent contained. It began on Monday in Fishlake National Forest in central Utah and has destroyed part of the Eagle Point ski resort and summer cabins in the region. The Snyder Fire, formed after the Knowles, Gore, Jones and Snyder Mesa fires merged, has burned more than 28,000 acres across Colorado and Utah.
The National Weather Service in Salt Lake City issued what it described as a "particularly dangerous situation" red flag warning on Friday, the first time it has used that designation in its history. The warning cited the volatile mix of wind, heat and low humidity, with critical fire-accelerating conditions expected to persist into Sunday.
Emergency Response and Evacuations
Utah Governor Spencer Cox declared a state of emergency earlier this week, restricting fireworks displays ahead of the Fourth of July holiday. Colorado Governor Jared Polis issued his own emergency declaration on Saturday, authorizing the use of the National Guard to help fight the fires in his state. Cox described the situation on the ground as grimmer than anything he had seen before, crediting crews with pulling off improbable rescues despite difficult conditions.
Hundreds of residents in the towns of Marysvale, Junction and Circleville were placed on notice to leave as conditions worsened on Saturday. The Mesa County Sheriff's Office asked people to evacuate the potential path of the fire and to turn on irrigation water to saturate the land. The federal Bureau of Land Management closed public access to lands it manages nearby, citing the rapid rates of spread and hazardous fire behavior.
Utah State Forester Jamie Barnes told reporters that fires across the state this season had been moving in ways that stretched the state's firefighting capacity to its limits, with new fires beginning closer to populated areas than in previous years. Rocky Mountain Power shut off electrical lines serving Beaver County and surrounding areas to reduce wildfire risk, a measure that has become increasingly common across the West.
