Fire crews battled a wind-whipped wildfire in Colorado today that burned dozens of homes.
The fire near Colorado Springs ignited yesterday and ripped through the Black Forest, 15 miles (24 km) northeast of the city, said a spokesman for the Rocky Mountain Area Coordination Center.
El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa, the fast-moving blaze reached a residential neighbourhood where it razed between 40 and 60 homes and an unknown number of outbuildings by late Tuesday and the fire was estimated to cover an area of at least 8,000 acres.
Evacuation notices went out to several thousand local residents, and Army National Guard troops have been deployed to help local police agencies prevent looting in the area.
Maketa compared the conflagration to the so-called Waldo Canyon Fire in June 2012 — the most destructive wildfire in Colorado’s history. It reduced about 350 homes to ash in the Colorado Springs area and led authorities to place more than 30,000 people in the area under mandatory evacuation orders.
In neighbouring Fremont County, a 3,800-acre wildfire broke out on Tuesday and prompted the evacuation of the Royal Gorge Bridge & Park, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management said in a statement.
In northern Colorado, a lightning-sparked wildfire that erupted on Monday in Rocky Mountain National Park has burned about 400 acres and is spreading. No structures are immediately threatened by that blaze.
The National Weather Service said single-digit humidity values and temperatures in the upper 90s Fahrenheit (upper 30s Celsius), combined with wind gusts in excess of 40 miles (64 km) an hour have created “very high to extreme fire danger” in Colorado for most of the week.