Dragon Bravo Fire: Grand Canyon Megafire has created his own time this week while Blaze continues to grow

Forest fires raging along the northern edge of the Grand Canyon have become a “megafire” this week, dubbing in size in a few days and intensifying enough to create its own time.

Hostile weather conditions, in particular intense and dry winds and gusts of Rafale, have led the explosive growth of the Bravo Fire dragon and erased a large part of the confinement progress made by firefighters.

The fire in northern Arizona has burned nearly 112,000 acres since it was put on July 4 and was 8% Contents Friday morning, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. It is the largest fire that is currently burning in the 48 lower states and its imprint is about three times the size of Washington, DC.

The Dragon Bravo fire reached megafire status after crossing the 100,000 acres threshold. The fire has more than doubled in size since Sunday, when it was around 50,000 acres, according to Inciweb data.

Indeed, the fuels of bone fire, like the brush, can go up in flames in an instant. Very dry air days have dehydrated those fuel At a drier level than dried wood in the oven, according to an update of Thursday fires.

Megafires like the fire Dragon Bravo are rare – only about 3% of forest fires reach this scale – but they explain the majority of the total area burned in the United States each year.

A shot of lightning triggered the forest fire on independence day and the crews initially chosen to manage it as a burn controlled instead of immediately suffocating it. The fire quickly became out of control about a week after ignition and firefighters have been fighting since.

The crews were able to control certain sections of the fire, although they are not yet fully contained, said the head of the Craig Daugherty section with the management of Southwest Area Incident in an update on Friday morning. The main areas of concern are along the northern border of the fire and part in the Southwest, where it is still spreading, said Daugherty.

The fire torn the historic lodge of the Grand Canyon from the North edge in mid-July and destroyed at least 70 other structures, including cabins and a center of visitors.

The fire was contained at 26% – its maximum level so far – last weekend, but the worsening of weather conditions this week sparked erratic fire behavior and considerably reduced its level of containment.

In fact, fire has become so intense that it has created its own time.

Pyrocumulus or “fire clouds” were spotted on Dragon’s fire Bravo for at least seven days in a row, the fire agent on fires, Lisa Jennings said on Thursday.

Pyrocumulus clouds are formed on intense heat sources, such as unleashed forest fires or volcaine eruptions. They develop because the air above such intense heat is forced quickly and chaotic to get up, which cools and condenses the humidity of the air, forming clouds.

If a forest fire is hot and chaotic enough, it could even feed a pyrocumulonimbus – a “fire storm” – which generates lightning, gusts of wind and sometimes produces tornadoes. Additional lightning blows of these types of clouds could trigger new flames or reactive areas that crews have already stifled.

Even outside the weather, the fire creates for itself, the conditions will remain difficult at least at the beginning of next week, if not beyond.

Friday, there is slight chances of showers and thunderstorms, but any burst or additional lightning in these storms could quickly cancel the little, if not, of help with rains.

An extreme heat warning is in force for the Grand Canyon until Tuesday and the gusty wind periods will not go at the beginning of next week. Frequent gusts of wind from around 20 to 25 MPH will perform on Friday and throughout the weekend before gusts up to 30 mi / h to recover at the start of next week.

In the United States, the forest fire season is also far from over, despite the calendar flip in August.

“We are at the heart of the summer and at the heart of the year of fire,” warned the National Interagency Fire Center on Friday.

The West will remain the main hot spot of forest fires until the least September, forecasts from the Show Center.