Oregon firefighters face return of hazardous conditions, COVID-19 outbreak

Strike teams making headway against a huge wildfire in Oregon faced a resurgence of dry, windy weather on Friday while an outbreak of COVID-19 among firefighters posed a new complication in battling the three-week-old blaze.

Hundreds of miles to the northeast, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management reported that five firefighters in Montana were injured on Thursday when a sudden shift in the wind blew flames over their position on the edge of a much smaller wildfire there. Both developments came as the National Weather Service posted red-flag warnings for south-central Oregon, most of Montana and a portion of eastern Idaho. More than 80 major wildfires are raging across those three states and 10 others in the West, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.