Calm and clammy air helped fire crews fight a huge wildfire to a standstill on Friday, but a second blaze sprang up and spread rapidly in another forest 100 miles south.
About 1,200 firefighters were dumping water and hacking down trees and scrub growth to encircle the 65-square-mile fire in the Matanuska Valley 50 miles from Anchorage, which destroyed up to 300 houses and buildings and damaged many more.
State fire investigator Mark Barker said the fire, which blew up all around the rural towns of Big Lake and Houston, acted “a lot like a tornado: One house is there and the other isn’t.”
With the larger fire in check, about 100 fresh reinforcements from California were diverted to fight the new blaze, which spread to 1,500 acres in 12 hours Friday in an unpopulated area of the Kenai Peninsula along the Gulf of Alaska.
But the focus remained on the earlier fire. Rising humidity, still air and forecasts of rain gave firefighters hope they could contain it soon. No buildings had burned in the last two days, and a haze of smoke that once stretched for tens of miles had cleared.
