America in flames

SO BAD are the seasonal wildfires sweeping America’s tinder-dry north-west that Alex Thomason, a public-spirited lawyer in Washington state, bought himself a second-hand fire engine to fight them. “We can operate hoses, we can understand water,” he told reporters. “We’re going to at least save one or two houses.” But this is not a problem American can-do-ishness can fix. In fact, overzealous firefighting is partly to blame for the fires that have so far consumed over 8.5m acres of forest in Washington, California, Idaho, Oregon, Montana and Alaska and which, with the desiccated Santa Ana winds yet to reach southern California, could exceed the record devastation of 2006, when nearly 10m burned.