Word: alaskas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Lighting the panoramic horizons in every direction, insatiable tongues of fire lapped steadily across Alaska last week in the worst series of forest fires that the state has seen in nearly a decade. Culminating a summer in which more than 200 fires have occurred, the biggest fire of all raged around the Fortymile River's West Fork, consuming the black spruce, cottonwood and paper birch and turning the green hills to barren black. At week's end, six other major fires spreading across a 500-mile arc still ravaged the nation's largest state...
...Large as Rhode Island. So far, the fires have devastated more than 650,000 acres of woods and tundra-an area roughly as large as Rhode Island. One fire jumped the Taylor Highway near the Canadian border, making the road impassable at times; others raged along the Alaska Highway. Around Fairbanks, smoke from the Salcha River fire 45 miles away became so dense that visibility was reduced to half a mile. The mining town of Chicken on the Taylor
Highway was nearly engulfed by the West Fork blaze, which has been burning for more than a month; the flames were stopped just two miles out of town. In north central Alaska, a fire near Bear Mountain on the Koyukuk River was also diverted just short of the Eskimo village of Huslia, but it burned...
...path. Smoke jumpers, some of them imported from Montana, parachuted into the forests with digging equipment; six converted B-25 bombers dropped chemical retardants on the fires. 150 Years to Grow. Normally, rain controls the blazes that start each summer, but this has been an extraordinarily dry season for Alaska. Chicken, for example, has had no rain since early May. Though lightning started most of the blazes, the woods are so parched that any ignition will do. The Goldstream fire 30 miles west of Fairbanks was started by sparks from a train's hot brake shoe, and an artillery...
...tried to remedy that lack at the National College of State Trial Judges on the Reno campus of the University of Nevada. The stu dent body consists of 96 recent recruits to the bench in 45 states; they range from a Philadelphia Negro judge to a jurist from Fairbanks, Alaska. First proposed in 1961 by Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark, the school has been financed by the W. K. Kellogg and Max C. Fleischmann foundations, may soon have an Eastern branch as well as the one at Reno...