>>we are having a heat wave at the same time making it very dangerous for the fire fighters
I was just talking to a friend who is one of the NPS people involved with the fire response and he said one of the fire chiefs said, "It's going to be a wild ride for a few days." Resources are stretched thin, the terrain is very rugged (yesterday the fire was burning from 3000 feet to 9000 feet), the foliage humidity levels are extremely low, there are record temperatures and there are winds.
This fire was at a reported 50,000 acres, but satellite imagery suggests more like 100,000 acres and they have 450 firefighters and 12 engines. So for 150 square miles, and rapidly becoming 200, they have basically three firefighters per square mile. It's not become a Type 1 incident, which means resources will be flowing in rapidly especially as the other big fires are winding down, but usually they don't make much headway on a fire like this until they get to about 3000 firefighters and 50 aircraft. With anything under 1000, they are just trying to save lives and protect critical infrastructure.
And... everyone south of us is on evacuation watch. We're on the border. I spent the day leafblowing the roof, gutters, any corners where things accumulate, cutting brush that I've been planning to cut for a month. I'm not worried, since we're pretty well protected because of recent fires, but those are all things that I should be doing monthly anyway, so why not now.