WASHINGTON, July 9 (UPI) -- A dense smoke is rising from the dense and chronically dry boreal forests of Canada Northwest Territories as wildfires continue to burn. As of this week, 164 different fires remained active and more than 1,642 square miles of forest and field had been charred.
"The drought conditions that we're seeing and the fire behavior that we're seeing is something we haven't seen, as I said, in about 30 years," explained Bill Mawdsley, the head of forest management for Canada's N.W.T. Department of Environment and Natural Resources.