Fast-moving blaze in southwest Utah destroys a dozen structures and forces evacuations

A fast-moving fire fueled by high winds on Friday has destroyed a dozen structures, including homes, and forced some in a rural area of southwest Utah to evacuate.
The Forsyth Fire started Thursday in the Pine Valley Mountains and has already burned about 2.3 square miles (5.96 square kilometers), said Karl Hunt, a spokesperson for the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire & State Lands. It has forced people to evacuate from the Pine Valley Community and nearby campgrounds, although the number of people who have fled was not immediately clear.
The blaze, which is about 15 miles (24.1 kilometers) northeast of St. George and includes steep, mountainous terrain, has also threatened 400 structures.
By Friday evening, the fire remained uncontained despite 150 people battling the blaze, including two hotshot crews from Utah and Nevada, according to Hunt. Teams were using helicopters, more than a dozen engines and water tenders.
The cause of the fire has not been determined and is under investigation, Hunt said.
He urged the public to stay away, saying: 'Let the firefighters do what they do best and try to get this fire under control.'
There has been a red flag warning in the area since Thursday because of high wind gusts, low humidity and high temperatures.
Hunt said the blaze came fairly early in the year, following a drought declaration by Utah's governor.
'So the fuel is drier this year as well. And so if you combine the drier fuel with the high winds and it's ripe for a wildfire,' he said. 'Kind of like the perfect storm.'
There have been no injuries or deaths, according to Hunt.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said on the social media site X that they are closely monitoring the fire and urged the public to follow local officials' instructions.
'If you're in the area, please evacuate immediately," he said. 'First responders are doing heroic work, but they need your cooperation to save lives.'

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Rail passengers have to walk along tracks on hottest day of year so far after fault brings trains to halt

Sky News

3 hours ago

Sky News

Rail passengers have to walk along tracks on hottest day of year so far after fault brings trains to halt

Scores of train passengers have been evacuated after some services were halted on what was the hottest day of the year in the UK so far. Video footage showed people, including young children, getting off a train near Loughborough Junction in south London and walking along the tracks with their luggage. Passenger Ioannis Dimitrousis, who filmed the incident, said he was travelling to Brighton when his train stopped. He said people were "locked in the train with no fresh air and no air conditioning". He said: "We were just going to Brighton but still messed up our day." He added that the train also had "lots of people" who were heading to Gatwick Airport who missed their flights. Another passenger wrote on X to Thameslink: "You will have hell to pay. We've been stuck on this hot and humid train for over an hour. "The doors were closed because we were told we may be moving. That was 15 minutes ago. It's like an oven in here and we're being slow-cooked." She said the train was "stuck between Blackfriars and East Croydon" in south London. A Thameslink spokesperson replied to her, saying: "This train will be getting evacuated shortly. Please wait until response staff have boarded and set up a safe evacuation route." Govia Thameslink Railway and Network Rail have apologised for the delays. A spokesperson said: "Earlier today, a fault on a train near Loughborough Junction brought all services to a halt in the area, three of them outside station platforms. "Without power and air conditioning on such a hot day, we pulled all resources from across Sussex and Kent to get personnel on site to safely evacuate passengers as quickly as possible along the track. "This would have been a difficult and uncomfortable experience for our passengers and we are truly sorry. "With safety our top priority, the safest place was to remain on the trains while we worked our hardest to get help to those on board." The spokesperson said due to engineering works, the route affected was the only one that Thameslink trains can take south out of London. And the disruption was expected to continue into the evening. The spokesperson continued: "Passengers delayed by 15 minutes or more are also entitled to compensation, with details on our website." It comes as the UK recorded the hottest day of the year so far, with a high of 33.2C (91.7F) in Charlwood, Surrey, according to the Met Office.

Rail passengers have to walk along tracks on hottest day of year so far after fault bring trains to halt

Sky News

4 hours ago

Sky News

Rail passengers have to walk along tracks on hottest day of year so far after fault bring trains to halt

Britain is burning – and fire chiefs fear the worst this summer

Telegraph

8 hours ago

Telegraph

Britain is burning – and fire chiefs fear the worst this summer

Wennington is less a village than a line of semi-detached houses stretched out along the B1335 where east London peters out into countryside. I say 'countryside', but it is really marshy wasteland bisected by an elevated stretch of the A13, a busy mainline railway and rows of unsightly pylons. Three years ago, this was the scene of a wildfire that caused unprecedented destruction of UK homes and other property – a wildfire that could well prove a harbinger of what the near, or very near, future holds. Britain has already suffered a record number of wildfires in 2025, following one of the driest springs on record. Natural England's Fire Severity Index presently rates the fire risk across much of the UK as 'very high' – one level below 'exceptional' – and the country faces the very real possibility of a drought this summer. Firefighters are understandably anxious. 'Every day over the last three months, my phone has pinged with another wildfire somewhere in the country,' Paul Garrigan, chair of the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC), tells me during an interview. 'We wouldn't be having this conversation – to heighten the public awareness of the risk – if I wasn't worried about this summer.' The extraordinary events of July 19, 2022 loom large in the collective memory of Garrigan's fellow fire chiefs. It was the hottest day ever recorded in the UK, with temperatures reaching 40C. It had been preceded by a long spell of warm, dry weather. At about 1pm, for reasons still unknown, a fire broke out where the garden of 21 The Green in Wennington met the dried-out marshland. Fanned by the wind, it raced through the village. Joe Kenny, the incident commander that day, was summoned from Bexley in south-east London. He sped through the Dartford tunnel and stepped out of his car in Wennington to be hit by a wall of heat, a raging fire and billowing black smoke. He could hear gas cylinders exploding in garden sheds. It was immediately obvious that 'the scale of the incident was larger than myself or any other colleagues had experienced', he told me during a rare return to the scene. He declared the fire a 'major incident' and urgently requested 15 pumps (fire engines) instead of the two or three already there. Some firefighters began evacuating nearby homes. Others, using hoses and a local farmer's bowser, rushed to create a firebreak further up the village. Residents later described the blaze as 'apocalyptic'. By the time 100 firefighters had finally brought it under control late that evening, 88 homes had been evacuated, while 17 houses, 12 stables, five garages, an electrical substation, a car repair workshop, several vehicles and numerous outbuildings had been destroyed across an area of 40 hectares. The Grade-II listed church of St Mary and St Peter had been miraculously spared, but the village looked like 'a scene from the Blitz', said one resident. 'This happens in Portugal, this happens in Spain. It doesn't happen in Wennington,' said another. Nor was Wennington the only 'Major Incident' that day. The London Fire Brigade (LFB) experienced its busiest 24 hours since the Second World War. There was another '15-pump' wildfire in nearby Dagenham. In total, the brigade fought 26 blazes requiring four or more pumps, compared with two on an average day. Across the country, 11 of the 46 fire and rescue services reported 'major incidents' – 14 in total – and nearly 100 buildings were destroyed. Homes and buildings were not the only casualties. Wildfires destroy precious wildlife habitats. They close motorways, roads and railway lines. They threaten to overwhelm fire services because the conditions that produce them mean several are likely to be raging simultaneously, 'spreading like wildfire' over large areas and requiring a lot of manpower and fire engines to extinguish. According to the London Fire Brigade: 'There were periods on July 19 2022 when almost all LFB appliances were deployed at incidents across London. This caused significant challenges in transporting and relieving crews and meeting the resource demands... with mutual aid from surrounding brigades stretched to the limit.' 'Incidents are increasing year by year' Today, few visible signs remain of the Wennington blaze – just a lot of rebuilding work, a couple of charred tree trunks and a poem pinned to the village noticeboard which refers to that 'truly horrendous fire'. But the events of that day are etched deep in the psyche of Britain's fire chiefs. For them, it was an epiphany in this age of drastic climate change – and, specifically, persistent dry spells. Never before had a wildfire in Britain destroyed so many homes. And no longer could this country dismiss wildfires on the so-called 'rural-urban interface' – those that threaten built-up areas – as misfortunes that beset only southern Europe or the western United States. That threat is only increasing. By May 8 this year, fire services across England and Wales had already recorded at least 463 wildfires that covered more than a hectare, required at least four fire engines, lasted more than six hours and posed a significant risk to life or property. That was nearly double the 253 recorded in the same period in 2022, which was itself a record-breaking year. According to satellite data compiled by the European Forest Fire Information Service (EFFIS), the UK has already suffered 168 fires of more than 30 hectares this year, with a total of 35,511 hectares burned across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. That is an area bigger than Manchester, and comfortably beats all previous records for entire years. Earlier in the 2000s, there were many years with no wildfires at all. Days like 19 July 2022 'are not going away', Garrigan, the NFCC chair and former head of Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service, told me. 'This is not something we deal with once and won't deal with for another 100 years. These incidents are increasing year by year… this was once a one-in-a-hundred-year event. Now it's a once in a 10-year or five-year or two-year event.' Andy Elliott, a veteran firefighter from Dorset who also runs a wildfire training and consultancy business and does research at Exeter and Birmingham Universities, concurs. 'We're getting more fires, more intense fires and more damaging fires,' he says. The events of July 19 2022 were 'absolutely unprecedented in the UK, but we'll see them again with much more frequency. What's currently happening in Portugal and Spain is moving our way.' Thomas Smith, an environmental scientist at the London School of Economics, explains that the peak of the wildfire season tends to be in March and April, when heaths, moors and woodland are still covered in dead or dormant gorse, heather, bracken and grass that does not 'green up' till early summer. That 'fuel' is becoming more susceptible to fires because warmer, drier spells are starting earlier in the year and lasting longer, he says. In Dorset, for example, the average duration of a warm spell is now between 20 and 30 days, compared to five and 10 days between 1961 and 1990. In Northumberland, it is 10 to 20 days, compared to one to five days in the late 20th century. The result is 'more fires and bigger fires' – primarily because of climate change but also because more people visit the countryside during warmer weather, increasing the risk of accidental ignitions. But even Smith was shocked by the Wennington fire. He and other scientists co-authored a climate change risk assessment in 2020. 'I don't think any of us thought we would see properties being destroyed by fire on the scale we saw in Wennington and Dagenham two years later,' he said. 'We thought maybe in 2030 at the earliest. It was a big, big surprise.' The Government and fire services had begun focusing on the risk of wildfires well before 2022: they had first appeared on the National Risk Register of the most serious threats to Britain as far back as 2015. But since the 19 July fires, the authorities have intensified their efforts to counter this new threat. That day 'was shocking. It surprised a lot of people,' says Elliott. Before it happened 'there was probably a deal of complacency around the potential severity of UK wildfires'. In recent years, the NFCC has established a cohort of about 50 'tactical advisers' to support the UK's fire and rescue services during wildfires. It has created several 'tactical burn teams' to create firebreaks by 'setting fires to stop fires'. Fire chiefs have dispatched officers to southern Europe, South Africa and the US to learn how best to fight huge wildfires. Most firefighters now have to take a basic wildfire awareness course, and their managers a more advanced one. British fire and rescue services cannot afford Californian-style planes and helicopters to fight wildfires, but some have been investing in all-terrain vehicles, four-wheel drive fire engines and big, off-road water-carrying trucks called Unimogs because wildfires often ignite in remote places with poor access. They have bought drones with thermal imaging capabilities that can measure the size, spread and direction of wildfires in real time. Kenny used one at the Wennington fire. 'They give us an absolutely fantastic overview of an incident,' he says. 'They give you a completely different perspective of the sheer scale and where the fire is moving, and for an incident commander, that's absolutely invaluable.' Some fire services have also acquired 'holey-hoses' – long hoses with holes which create two-metre-high 'curtains' of water that can be swiftly deployed to prevent fires spreading. They have purchased lighter protective clothing, backpack sprayers and tools for creating firebreaks. They are running public awareness campaigns ('Bring a picnic, not a barbecue') and have sought to dissuade supermarkets from selling disposable barbecues during heatwaves. Smith is part of a team commissioned by the National Environmental Research Council to develop a fire danger rating system – a sophisticated app for firefighters, landowners and others. It can instantly calculate the risk of fires igniting, and their likely intensity and rate of spread, anywhere in the country based on weather conditions, types of vegetation and their moisture content. Garrigan talks of other technologies in the pipeline, including big, water-carrying drones and 'pre-deployed electric noses' – sensors that can 'smell' wildfires, which would be planted on heaths and moors. The Forestry Commission is running courses on fire management and prevention for landowners. Re-wetting peatlands helps, but less upland grazing and 're-wilding' probably do not. The National Trust, which is one of Britain's largest landowners with 250,000 hectares and 780 miles of coastline, is experimenting with an 'ultra-early' wildfire detection project using solar-powered sensors that deploy artificial intelligence to detect tiny, incipient fires from 100 metres away. 'There's a lot more to be done. I don't think the pace of change is fast enough… I don't think the risk is being taken seriously enough,' says Smith, but measures to counter wildfires do not come cheap – a single new Unimog equipped for firefighting costs roughly £400,000. The NFCC is presently negotiating a new four-year funding settlement (of an undisclosed sum) with the Government and pressing for a significant increase in resources to confront the rising danger of both wildfires and another increasingly common consequence of climate change – severe flooding. 'Am I assured that we're fully resourced for any eventuality? Not at this moment, which is a reason why the so-called Comprehensive Spending Review is pivotal in ensuring we have the right kit, people, equipment and support to at least keep pace with climate change and preferably to get ahead of it,' Garrigan says. 'If we can't get ahead of this, it's only going to become more problematic and more severe.' He points out that the UK's fire and rescue services have 11,000 fewer firefighters than a decade ago due to spending cuts, while the number of incidents they respond to has risen 20 per cent. 'We're way shy of the numbers we need to deal with this kind of emergent risk,' he says. A review of the July 19 2022, fires found that 39 of the London Fire Brigade's fire engines were 'off the run' – out of action – because there were not enough firefighters. Fire chiefs say the general public also needs to become much more aware of the dangers of wildfires. Almost all are started by humans, says Elliott. Most people 'pick up their litter, take glass bottles home, don't carelessly drop cigarettes and don't take disposable barbecues into rural areas,' says Garrigan. But others do. 'During periods of extreme weather, to go out and think it's acceptable to sit in an area of parkland and leave a barbecue behind is beyond me.' 'Human-caused fires' And then there are arsonists. Garrigan readily acknowledges that some of this year's 463 wildfires will have been set deliberately. Elliott says that of the 470 wildfires – big and small – that the Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service tackled in the year that ended on March 31, at least 39, and probably many more, were the work of arsonists. Nor has arson been ruled out as a cause of the Wennington fire. Why do arsonists set fires, I ask? Tess Cross, who oversees the Dorset and Wiltshire brigade's arson reduction programme, says a fair number are set by teenagers through 'boredom, curiosity and peer pressure'. Dominic Pearson, an associate professor of forensic psychology at Portsmouth University, who runs a successful education programme for convicted arsonists for Hampshire's fire service, cites 'boredom, excitement, curiosity, a need for recognition, cries for help and thrill-seeking' as motivating factors, allied with easy access to large, unprotected targets. Elliott – a firefighter for 42 years – drives me to Upton Heath, a rolling expanse of gorse, heather and bracken on the north-western edge of Poole in Dorset. This is Thomas Hardy country. The Heath should be gorgeous, and much of it is. But 52 hectares of it are charred and blackened following a wildfire that erupted shortly before midnight on April 2. It took 12 fire engines, between 70 and 80 firefighters and various other emergency vehicles at least 12 hours to extinguish the blaze, by which time the precious habitat of countless nesting birds, frogs, snakes, lizards, voles, beetles and insects had been destroyed. 'This would be assumed to be arson,' says Elliott as we survey the damage from the top of a low hill. There was no other obvious cause, he says, and notes that another equally inexplicable wildfire broke out at nearby Canford Heath a few hours later. He shows me a video posted on TikTok of a young man cycling along the edge of the blazing heath on a mountain bike at about 1am. There is no evidence to show that the youth was connected to the fire, but the clip begs the question of what he was doing there at that time of night. Elliott also tells me of an anonymous challenge to set the biggest fire in Dorset that was recently posted on social media. He then walks me across the heath to a row of spacious, up-market bungalows bordering the heath. This is Beacon Road which is – in a very real sense – a beacon for the rest of the UK. There was a previous wildfire on Upton Heath in 2011, and on that occasion, Beacon Road's homes had to be evacuated. 'It scared the community,' says Elliott, so they decided to take pre-emptive action. They signed up for a programme called Firewise-UK, which advises residents on how to protect their homes against wildfires, and they now form the longest-running 'Firewise community' in the country. They have cleared the vegetation from a long strip of land between their gardens and the heath in order to form a 'defensible' firebreak, or buffer zone, some 15 metres wide. They have removed wooden fences and garden sheds that might act as conduits for wildfires. They have replaced highly flammable trees and bushes, such as leylandii, with less flammable ones and regularly clear leaves and other combustible material from their gutters, roofs and decks. In the driveways at the front of their homes, the residents now park their cars facing outwards so they can make a quick getaway in an emergency. Inside, says Elliott, they keep 'grab bags' of essential items to take with them. Beside the road itself stand two metal bins containing high-vis jackets, bollards and signs with which to close the cul-de-sac. These measures may sound extreme, says Elliott, but 'climate change is not something for the future. We're in it now, and the best way to prevent a repeat of July 19 2022 is if all those communities adjoining open land were to use Firewise principles. It would dramatically reduce the potential to lose homes.' (The Association for British Insurers confirmed after the summer blazes of 2022 that most home insurance policies cover wildfire damage.) Garrigan would also like to see the measures adopted by the residents of Beacon Road replicated wherever urban areas of Britain face open land in order to 'mitigate and manage the risk' to people's homes. 'You wouldn't want people to learn from their experiences. You'd want them to act now.' The looming possibility of a drought this summer adds to the urgency. Last month, Australian-style wildfire warning signs were erected in the Peak District and south Pennines. Half a dozen heritage railways have already stopped using steam engines in their sheds lest they spark fires. For the same reason, the National Trust chose not to light Dunkery Beacon in Somerset to mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day, and has warned that 2025 is 'turning out to be the worst year ever for these human-caused fires across the country'. The UK is on 'a fairly dangerous trajectory', says Elliott, adding that 'this could be a challenging summer for us'. Garrigan concurs: 'We've had another warmer, wetter winter so vegetation has grown rapidly, and now we're facing a hot, dry summer. These things combined are really problematic.'