This fire is so big it’s creating its own weather

The fire has scorched more than 606 square miles — an area larger than Los Angeles and about half the size of Rhode Island. It grew to more than 388,350 acres overnight from Monday to Tuesday and is 30% contained, according to data from the InciWeb interagency website.

Much of the West remains under the threat of fire conditions Tuesday, with more than 3.5 million people under red flag warnings, according to a tweet from the National Weather Service Weather Prediction Center. A red flag warning means “critical fire weather conditions are either occurring now, or will shortly,” the prediction center said.

Excessive heat warnings will continue for more than 337,000 people, and nearly 650,000 more are under a heat advisory.

Temperatures in the region will remain up to 10 degrees above normal over the next 48 hours, CNN meteorologist Michael Guy said. There’s also a chance of dry storms, which lack the precipitation that is desperately needed to help calm the flames.

While some sporadic rain is possible across the Intermountain West, “this is not really going to do much in the way of fighting any of the wildfires out West,” Guy said.

“Some rain may fall from afternoon storms, but it will not be enough to stop or put out the fires that are ongoing,” he said.

The Bootleg Fire is changing the weather

In Oregon, fire officials noted the Bootleg Fire is showing “aggressive surface spread with pyrocumulus development.”

The fire is “so large and generating so much energy and extreme heat that it’s changing the weather,” Kauffman explained. “Normally, the weather predicts what the fire will do. In this case, the fire is predicting what the weather will do.”

“The fire is burning … dense fuels that are extremely dry from a prolonged drought. Up until today, the weather has been consistently hot, dry with near single-digit humidity,” he said.

Doug Grafe, chief of fire protection for the Oregon Department of Forestry, said the drought conditions are driving the fire potential with 90% of the state in either exceptional, extreme or severe drought conditions.

“The future for us for the remainder of the season continues to look above normal dry and above normal temperatures,” Grafe said. “So this is not going to return to normal anytime soon, so we’re facing a long, difficult fire season.”

It is possible another 50,000 to 100,000 acres could burn before the fire is contained, he said.

State Fire Marshal Mariana Ruiz-Temple said the current fire season “historic in terms of the amount of resources we’ve deployed” and how many times they have deployed. She added, “We’ve mobilized to six conflagrations, and this is the earliest and most significant mobilization to date.”

Third-largest fire in state history

Sixty-seven homes have been destroyed, along with 117 minor structures, such as sheds or detached garages, Gracey said.

The fire has averaged a rate of spread nearly 1,100 acres per hour for more than 13 consecutive days — a rate that would burn through New York’s Central Park in only 45 minutes.

And there appears to be little hope for progress against the flames as wind gusts up to 25 mph are expected over the next couple of days, Guy said.

“Fighting this fire is a marathon, not a sprint,” Rob Allen, incident commander for PNW Incident Management Team 2, said in an update Tuesday. “We’re in this for as long as it takes to safely confine this monster.”

The Bootleg Fire is the third-largest wildfire in the state’s history, Kauffman said. The Long Draw Fire in 2012 burned 557,028 acres and is the largest wildfire in Oregon since 1900, Kauffman said. The Biscuit Fire in 2002 became the state’s second-largest fire, burning nearly 500,000 acres.