Colorado firefighters struggle to control large blazes in drought-stricken state

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Colorado firefighters were struggling to control several large wildfires, including the state’s largest on record, with smoke badgering some of the most populous areas in the region.

The largest blaze in Colorado, the Cameron Peak fire, has scorched 203,634 acres and destroyed more than 50 structures in the Arapaho and Roosevelt national forests since it ignited in mid-August and is 62% contained, according to InciWeb, a wildfire tracking site.

But new fires have continued to break out, including a blaze that started on Saturday about 17 miles north-west of Boulder and has destroyed at least 20 homes, and a fire that started Sunday about 20 miles north-west of Boulder and caused the evacuation of at least 145 homes. That last fire prompted the evacuation of the entire town of Ward, which has about 150 residents, county officials said.

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On Tuesday, the state’s health department asked residents in the Denver and Boulder metro area to limit driving to avoid making air pollution caused by wildfire smoke even worse.

Colorado has been stricken by a severe drought, which is making the landscape more prone to burning. The latest figures from the US Drought Monitor showed that the entire state of Colorado was at some level of drought.

“It’s extremely late; it should be snowing by now,” said Larry Helmerick, the spokesman for the Rocky Mountain Area Coordination Center, a federal interagency wildfire tasked with dispatching resources across the region.

There have have been few lightning strikes in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, so it is believed most of the wildfires are human-caused, Helmerick said. Tinder-dry fuels and high winds are causing flames to spread rapidly.

“It’s so dry that it’s hard to get a handle on them,” he said.

It’s been a disastrous fire season for the American west. California has seen more than more than 3.3m acres scorched by fire since a mid-August lightning storm ignited hundreds of fires across the state, and recorded a “gigafire”, a blaze spanning 1m acres, for the first time in modern history. Oregon suffered through some of the most intense blazes in recent state history in September, when multiple deadly fires forced hundreds of thousands to evacuate. Firefighters have also battled large blazes in Washington state, Arizona and New Mexico.