Experts address hundreds of people on Wyoming wildfires

RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) – A series of large and powerful wildfires have impacted Northeastern Wyoming in the past few weeks. In the effort to fight them, leaders addressed a crowd of hundreds in Gillette Tuesday.

More than 200,000 acres have been scorched by wildfires in Northeastern Wyoming, prompting evacuations and a massive, coordinated firefighting effort.

Firefighters, incident commanders, and meteorologists provided information and updates to a large crowd in Gillette’s CAM-PLEX Energy Hall Tuesday night, including affected homeowners, first responders on the front lines, and Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon.

Crews from around the country came to Northeastern Wyoming to aid firefighting efforts, including Ansgar Mitchell’s crew from Arizona.

“It’s been a great partnership working with the local resources where they’ve tried to give us as much information of how their communities receive information and, you know, one of them being tonight at this community meeting,” Ansgar Mitchell, Southwest Area Incident Management Team said.

Several fires have erupted in recent weeks, including the House Draw Fire, the Flat Rock Fire, and the Constitution Fire.

Though Monday’s storms brought some rain to the region, experts predict dry conditions favorable for wildfires to return soon.

”So, we’re definitely pretty much done, unfortunately, with precipitation chances for the next seven days or so,” Bruno Rodriguez, Incident Meteorologist, NWS Boulder said, “We have some very slim chances here and there. But it does look like a warm, dry pattern is gonna be interspersed with some breezy conditions, some dry conditions.”

Though the challenge of stopping the fires is far from over, meeting attendees left with new knowledge on how to stay safe through the fiery Wyoming summer.

See a spelling or grammatical error in our story? Please click here to report it.

Do you have a photo or video of a breaking news story? Send it to us here with a brief description.

Copyright 2024 KOTA. All rights reserved.