We have a thick smokey haze and can smell the fire in Oshkosh, WI, more than 400 miles from the fire.
High winds propelled a forest fire across the northern Minnesota wilderness Monday, quadrupling its size, forcing evacuations of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and several dozen homes, and prompting officials to call for national firefighting reinforcements.
On Monday, the Pagami Creek fire, which started with a lightning strike 20 miles east of Ely in late August and burned inconsequentially for more than a week, had charred more than 20,000 acres after strong northwest winds caused it to bolt south and east. The fire "has confounded a lot of people," said Jean Bergerson, lead public information officer for the U.S. Forest Service and local agencies on this fire. On Monday, it was approaching one-third the size of 2007's Ham Lake fire, the state's most destructive blaze in nearly 90 years.
A forecast calling for continued winds, unusually low humidity and only a slight chance of rain through Wednesday prompted local officials to seek to transfer management of the fire to a Forest Service team from Rocky Mountain states. That team should arrive in the area Tuesday, Bergerson said.
About 150 firefighters from Minnesota and other Midwestern states have been fighting the blaze. But winds have hampered efforts to attack it from the air, and firefighters paddling into the burn areas, like canoeists paddling out, have struggled to move on wind-whipped lakes, Bergerson said.
http://www.startribune.com/local/129697733.html
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