UPDATE: A tanker plane crash has killed a firefighting pilot in Oregon as Western wildfires spread
A vehicle drives past the spreading River Fire Thursday, July 25, 2024, near Myrtle, Idaho, before U.S. Highway 12 was closed. Lightning strikes have sparked fast-moving wildfires in Idaho, prompting the evacuation of multiple communities. (August Frank/Lewiston Tribune via AP)
Communities in the U.S. West and Canada were under siege from raging wildfires on Friday, as a fast-moving blaze sparked by lightning sent people fleeing on roads ringed with fire in rural Idaho and a human-caused inferno forced the evacuation of hundreds of homes in northern California.
A pilot has been found dead in a crashed tanker plane that disappeared in eastern Oregon while fighting one of the many wildfires spreading across several Western states.
A Grant County Search and Rescue team located the aircraft Friday morning and confirmed the death, said Lisa Clark, a Bureau of Land Management information officer for the Falls Fire. The single-engine tanker, a small and nimble plane that looks like a crop duster, was located in steep, forested terrain after the search was suspended at nightfall the day before, Clark said.
The plane contracted by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management went missing Thursday. The pilot was the only person on board. The Falls Fire, near the town of Seneca on the edge of the Malheur National Forest, has grown to 219 square miles and is 55% contained, the government website InciWeb shows.