More firefighters will join the effort on two fires burning in northeastern Alaska near Venetie in the upcoming days. The BLM Alaska Fire Service North Star Crew mobilized to Venetie today to help take steps to clean up an old fire break around the village to protect it from the Marten Creek Fire (#386) burning about 13 miles to the east. Firefighters are also assessing steps to take to protect three historical structures to the south of the fire. Despite receiving light precipitation on Tuesday with more predicted today, the fire was fairly active with considerable growth to the east due to continuous black spruce. The estimated number of acres burned is 625, a decrease in acreage due to better mapping. The University of Alaska-Fairbanks Nanook Fire Crew will head north to help smokejumpers working on the Discovery Creek Fire (#388) burning in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge about 30 miles northwest of Venetie.  

VIDEO/PHOTOS: A fire that officials say started from welding sparks destroyed a house in Hurricane on Wednesday afternoon and for a time threatened Hurricane Middle School and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' seminary building. There were no injuries and by 4:58 p.m., the fire was contained. The fire was first reported as a brush fire at 3:41 p.m., provoking a response from Hurricane wildfire crews. But the flames spread to an adjacent home located on at 366 W. 300 North. Flames and smoke could be seen rising out of the home into the Hurricane sky. Officials initially said the sparks that started the fire came from the junkyard, but Hurricane Valley Fire Battalion Chief Nick Wright said it was actually someone working on the house.  

When Jeff Bowen was growing up in Southern California he would walk home from school by a fire station. One day, after the 6-year-old did not come home, his mother, Laurel Bowen, said she went looking for him at the station where she knew some of the firefighters. A captain pointed her inside. "He said, 'You know he stops every day to talk to us.'" The boy was sitting in the driver's seat of a fire engine. After his mother expressed her concern, he said to her, "Mom, I want you to know something. I'm going to drive one of these one day," his mother recalled. He did. After putting out wildfires in California, Jeff Bowen moved to Asheville where he was promoted to fire department engineer and later captain. On July 28, 2011, the day a four-alarm blaze ripped through a medical building at 445 Biltmore Ave., Laurel Bowen and other family members came to the scene.  

Last week at a media conference Vice Admiral Roy Kitchener, the commander of US Navy warships, outlined the actions that have been taken since the Bonhomme Richard caught fire in San Diego last year… and he has completely missed the point. "We found that in some cases maybe we weren't doing as well as we should have," Kitchener told US Naval Institute editor Sam LaGrone. "We're pretty good at firefighting at sea and all those procedures. When we got to the industrial environment, it was ‘OK, looks like we need to kind of make sure there's a little bit of education." His solution? The Admiral and his team decided to "beef up the safety staff" and added a mix of civilian and military fire marshals to check ships on the waterfront and in the yard. He didn't mention that crews did not have THE single most basic piece of equipment needed to fight large ship fires: a fireboat.  

A year and a half into the COVID-19 pandemic, the world looks a lot different than it used to. And so does the coronavirus itself. As it's infected hundreds of millions of people around the globe, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been in a state of constant change, making small tweaks to its genetic code as it goes along. New variants have taken over from the virus's earlier forms — like the highly contagious delta variant that is currently throwing a wrench in our "new normal." Here, we break down what you need to know about the viral variants sweeping the world. The coronavirus, like other viruses, spreads by hijacking human cells to make copies of itself. But that process isn't always perfect: Sometimes, the copied versions of the virus have a few typos in their genetic code. This means the coronavirus is constantly mutating as it spreads.