Firefighters claimed progress in battling a 15-day-old blaze in eastern Arizona as it inched closer Sunday to becoming the worst fire in the state's history.
The second-largest blaze had scorched 430,171 acres, firefighters said late Saturday, an area bigger than most of the largest cities in the United States.
The so-called Wallow Fire is 38,467 acres shy of matching the Rodeo/Chediski wildfire of 2002, Arizona's biggest.
Firefighters said they are making progress as they dig trenches, set their own fires to take away natural fuels from the advancing blaze and dump retardants from the air on the 100-plus-foot flames.
It "has been chasing us around, but after today we're feeling very optimistic," Jerome MacDonald told reporters late Saturday.
The fire, which broke out May 29 in the Apache National Forest, is 6 % contained, said MacDonald, the operations chief for the Southwest Interagency Incident Management team, which is fighting the fire.
Two weeks and only 6% contained: everything you need to know about how serious this blaze is. President Obama has already contacted Gov. Jan Brewer and offered her whatever Federal help necessary to help the state and its residents. For her part, the Republican has graciously accepted because after all, the federal government is bearing most of the cost to battle the massive wildfire.
Yet another red state Republican example of "we'll gladly take Obama's help and federal taxpayer money" while ranting about the federal government failing their state's citizens nearly every other second of every other day that doesn't include disasters to clean up.
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