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Posted: 3:37 PM- So many fires are burning across the country -- and so many more ignite each day because of dry vegetation -- that fire managers raised the nation's fire preparedness to its highest level today, meaning all the available resources are on call.
Nationally, there are 71 large fires, several of them over 10,000 acres, said Randy Eardley, a spokesman for the Interagency Fire Center in Boise, which coordinates the nation's response to wildfires.
"We get stretched a little thin," he said.
The new preparedness level now empowers fire managers to dispatch additional staff from federal land agencies to the fire lines and to call in National Guard units and firefighters from cooperating agencies in Canada, Australia and Mexico.
The top-priority wildfire in the Eastern Great Basin is the Dakota Hill fire in Zion National Park. The fire blew up from around 1,500 acres to about 8,320 overnight and forced closure of the park's backcountry.
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