Lightning, wind, high mercury and an alarming drought: the American West braced for the worst on Friday in the face of a cocktail of weather forecasts conducive to new violent fires this weekend.
It is in the state of Oregon - where the city of Portland is located - that we are most concerned.
The Bootleg Fire, a blaze already bigger than New York City, keeps getting bigger, with no sign of respite to come.
Several homes have already been destroyed.
Read also: Heatwave in the United States and Canada: a "heat dome" probably worsened by climate change
“I saw the flames spreading up the side of the cliff about a mile from our house and got the call telling me to pack up and go. So I put what I could in the truck with the two dogs and off we went
,
”
Klamath County resident Frank Lee Smith told AFP.
"We continue to use all resources, from bulldozers to water bombers, to intervene where possible,"
said Rob Allen, in charge of fire management in the area. But he predicts that the
"hot, dry and windy conditions will worsen over the weekend"
, making their task even more difficult.
Very close to California, the fire also threatens the electricity grid of this state and the authorities want at all costs to prevent millions of people from being plunged into darkness, as was the case in previous years.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has therefore announced the sending of reinforcements to Oregon, while being alarmed by the multiple fires that firefighters in California are already facing.
Dry thunderstorms
"Climate change favors the development of increasingly dangerous and destructive fires across the American West
,
"
lament the California emergency management services. Especially since the vicious circle in which the American West is plunged this summer - repeated heatwaves and a drought that transform the area into a powder keg - should be added a new disruptive element this weekend: lightning.
"I'm quite worried about the dry thunderstorms that could fall on Sunday and Monday,"
said Daniel Swain, climate specialist at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).
These thunderstorms, not accompanied by rain, are often the cause of new fires.
The situation was not much better across the border in Canada.
Heat, fires ... a comparable cocktail made the authorities fear the worst.
More than 100 Mexican firefighters are due to arrive in Toronto on Saturday to fight the fires in northwestern Ontario.
This province, the most populous in Canada, had several dozen forest fires, some of which extended over some 20,000 hectares.
Heat warnings have also been issued for several provinces, from Alberta to Ontario.
Air quality alerts, linked to smoke from the fires, have been triggered in half of the country's ten provinces.
