The wildfire season started slowly.
Then, just a few weeks ago, a series of lightning strikes here in arid eastern Washington combined with unusually high winds — and everything changed.
More than 400,000 acres had burned by Friday, thousands of residents and tourists had been evacuated, scores of homes had been destroyed and three federal firefighters had died battling the blazes.
"It happened in just a matter of a couple of weeks," said Tina Boehle of the National Interagency Fire Center. "We've had to put resources quickly in so many areas."
The rapid surge has so thinly stretched the traditional blend of federal, state and local firefighters who work together each year that, for the first time since 2006, the Defense Department plans to quickly train and deploy more than 200 soldiers to join the fight as soon as this weekend.