Tanker plane crashes amid Oregon wildfires [Video]

Rebecca Boone and John Antczak –

Communities in the U.S. West and Canada were under siege from raging wildfires on Friday, as a fast-moving blaze sparked by lightning sent people fleeing on roads ringed with fire in rural Idaho and a human-caused inferno forced the evacuation of hundreds of homes in northern California.

A pilot was found dead in a crashed tanker plane that disappeared in eastern Oregon while fighting one of the many wildfires spreading across several Western states.

A Grant County Search and Rescue team located the aircraft Friday morning and confirmed the death, said Lisa Clark, a Bureau of Land Management information officer for the Falls Fire. The single-engine tanker, a small and nimble plane that looks like a crop duster, was located in steep, forested terrain after the search was suspended at nightfall the day before, Clark said.

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The plane contracted by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management went missing Thursday. The …