A week of lightning sparked dozens of Alaska fires and forced an entire town to flee

Lightning put Alaska through a brutal week of wildfire, sparking dozens of new fires and stretching crews across the state.

Slow-moving thunderstorms hammered the state from June 15 to 21, throwing down more than 4,200 strikes Friday, 4,300 Saturday and 5,100 Sunday. Those three days alone sparked 32 of the 43 new fires the Division of Forestry and Fire Protection logged for the week.

The most dangerous emptied a town. Saturday evening the Denali Borough ordered all of Anderson, 80 miles south of Fairbanks, to evacuate after the Starry Fire erupted behind the elementary school and started crowning. By Sunday morning it had reached about 688 acres with roughly 75 firefighters, who worked until 4 a.m. Evacuees were sent to Tri-Valley School in Healy. A cluster of fires near town, including the Lost Fire to the north, drew water-scooping aircraft and a Type 3 management team. The cause is under investigation.

Some of the week's fires didn't have to happen. The Barbara Fire near Nikiski escaped an unpermitted burn pile, and the Matanuska Fire started from an unattended burning trash pile. As the division put it, preventable fires pull crews off the ones that can't be avoided.

To keep up, the agency left some remote fires unstaffed and concentrated resources on those threatening communities. Critics say that approach can hide the risk until fire behavior turns suddenly, which is exactly what happened at Anderson, where a fire behind a school became a town-wide evacuation within hours.

Evacuation maps and updates are posted at denaliborough.org/fire.