His balloons had whirled like tops, caught fire, exploded and fallen to the ground like stones.
"For no reason, it just exploded," Steiner told KIRO 7. "And not just a little fire, exploded.
That fire exploded into conflagration — destroying several hundred homes in Los Alamos — after a planned burn on a national monument site got out of control.
Moving with them, my colleagues and I took temporary cover behind hummocks of earth when the fighters began yelling and running, or when artillery shells, which the government forces had begun to fire, exploded in the near distance.
Forest ecologists say it is no coincidence the Rim fire exploded through areas which had seen few or no blazes in almost a century – an unnatural absence since California's mountain flora evolved to burn.
So it was Tuesday night in a canyon of dry timber, when 21 firefighters who had been mopping up a small fire in the rugged North Cascades found themselves scrambling to get inside their shelters after the fire exploded beyond control.
