The Nation - News from Sept. 15, 1988

Cold, damp weather retarded blazes and chilled firefighters at Yellowstone National Park, but experts cautioned that the West’s worst fire season in decades wasn’t necessarily over yet. The fires that have burned nearly a million acres of the nation’s oldest national park have grown together to form a single blaze, but cold, wet weather has helped firefighters, officials said. “It’s been so cold out there the firefighters are coming in to get warm, and that’s really good if they can’t stay warm fighting a fire,” said Denny Bungarz, a fire commander at Yellowstone, where temperatures had dipped as low as the upper 20s overnight.