Destructive U.S. Southwest fires have burned dozens of homes in northern Arizona and put numerous small villages in New Mexico in the path of danger, as wind-fueled flames chewed up wide swaths of tinder-dry forest and grassland and plumes of smoke filled the sky.
In this photo provided by the National Park Service, fallen trees smolder after a wildfire at Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument in Arizona, Wednesday, April 20, 2022. Winds are expected to intensify through the end of the week as firefighters battle blazes across the Southwest. Resources are tight, and fire managers are scrambling to get crews on board.
“It’s a very chaotic situation out there,” Stewart Turner, a fire behavior analyst, said during a briefing Friday night on the edge of the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico. “We’ve had extreme fire behavior all day.” By Friday, afternoon winds were gusting up to 75 mph in northern New Mexico near the Colorado line, shrouding the Rio Grande Valley with dust and pushing flames through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the north.
They did — with nine dogs and five puppies packed into an SUV and an old blue Cadillac They considered dropping the horses off at a local fairgrounds, but they decided it was in the same path of the burning fire as their home and more likely to burn.Lena Atencio and her husband, whose family has lived in the nearby Rociada area for five generations, got out Friday as winds kicked up. She said most people were taking the threat seriously.
In Arizona, flames had raced through rural neighborhoods outside Flagstaff just days earlier. A break in the weather Thursday allowed helicopters to drop water on the blaze and authorities to survey the damage.
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