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