LA SAL, Utah — A hot and dry summer has led to multiple wildfires across the West, including in Utah, where firefighters are battling eight such large blazes, scorching over 60,000 acres.
One of those fires is the Deer Creek Fire burning near La Sal, and if a mountain of flames and smoke weren’t enough to deal with, on Monday afternoon, the whole thing started spinning.
“One of our firefighters captured this unusual phenomenon of a fire vortex tearing through pinyon-juniper woodland on the Deer Creek Fire, just outside of La Sal,” said officials with the Utah Bureau of Land Management. “Fortunately, no one was injured.”
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Fire whirls are spinning columns of hot air and gases rising up from a fire, according to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group. When the air and gases rise, they also carry up smoke, debris, and even fire, as seen in the vortex of fire in the video.
The vortices can be as small as under one foot wide to over 500 feet wide, the NWCG said. Fire whirls on the larger side can be as strong as a small tornado. It seems from the video that the Deer Creek version was on the larger side.
One of the largest and most destructive fire whirls occurred in 2018 during the Carr Fire in Redding, California, the National Weather Service said. It had wind speeds of about 143 mph, equivalent to those found in EF-3 tornadoes.
