Evacuations begin as wildfire nears Academy

— More than 2,100 residents were being evacuating from the Air Force Academy’s grounds Tuesday night as heavy smoke billowed from a wildfire that has burned homes near Colorado Springs.

The academy was telling families to leave two main housing areas, but an area of the 28-square-mile campus that houses cadets wasn’t immediately evacuated. A new class of cadets is still scheduled to report Thursday.

Fire officials had issued a pre-evacuation notice for the academy earlier Tuesday. El Paso County sheriff’s officials have ordered an estimated 32,000 people to leave.

Fire information officer Greg Heule said earlier Tuesday that the fire was less than 5 miles from the southwest corner of the Air Force Academy’s campus.

Television images showed homes burning, and the Flying W Ranch southwest of the academy said on its website that the ranch had burned to the ground.

The Waldo Canyon Fire has burned several homes, but Colorado Springs Fire Chief Richard Brown said “many, many homes” also have been saved.

Meanwhile, authorities in central Utah found one woman dead Tuesday when they returned to an evacuated area, marking the first casualty in a blaze that consumed at least two dozen homes and appears to be taking a turn for the worse.

Throughout the interior West, firefighters toiled in searing, record-setting heat that refused to relinquish its grip, as they struggled to contain blazes in Colorado, Utah and other Rocky Mountain states Tuesday.

Colorado has endured nearly a week of 100-plus-degree days and low humidity, sapping moisture from timber and grass, creating a devastating formula for volatile wildfires across the state and punishing conditions for firefighters.

All of Utah and much of Wyoming, Colorado and Montana were under a red-flag warning, meaning conditions were hot, dry and ripe for fires.

Tuesday was the fifth-consecutive day with temperatures of 100 degrees or higher in Denver, tying a record set in 2005 and 1989. On Monday, Denver set a record with 105degrees. The previous record for June 25 was 100 degrees in 1991.

Other areas of the state also topped 100 degrees Tuesday, including the northeastern Colorado town of Wray, which hit 108, the National Weather Service said.

What the nation is now seeing is “a super-heated spike on top of a decades-long warming trend,” said Derek Arndt, head of climate monitoring at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

The U.S. set 107 new temperature records Monday and in the past week has set 782 of them, which are large numbers but hard to put in context because the data center has only been tracking the number of daily records broken for littlemore than a year, Arndt said.

But what’s truly impressive, Arndt said, is that in the past three days in Colorado and Kansas, nine sites have set records regardless of the date. Usually hottest-ever marks are set in July and August.

Information for this article was contributed by Susan Montoya Bryan, Rema Rahman and Seth Borenstein of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 2 on 06/27/2012

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