FRANK SESNO, CNN ANCHOR: Moving out West now, more than 20,000 civilian and military firefighters there are struggling to gain the upper hand on dozens of wildfires raging across 11 separate states. All told, more than 4 million acres have been consumed by fire so far. Montana's governor is expected to announce a widespread ban on the use of public lands in an attempt to curb the start of new fires. For more on the situation in Montana, I'm joined now on the phone by Larry Akers. He's with the Emergency Operation Center in Helena, Montana. What can you tell us about the status of these fires now and, in particular, this use of public lands?</s>LARRY AKERS, EMERGENCY OPERATIONS CTR., HELENA, MONTANA: OK, what we've got right now, we've got 20 major fires, what we call "manned fires," burning out of control for approximately 305,000 acres. We've got a lot of other fires that simply we do not have the manpower to get to them at this time. The governor has already established a proclamation of what we call Level 4, which severely restricts any type of logging, chainsaws, any type of internal combustion engine, literally smoking in the woods, and so forth. He is anticipating this afternoon taking thank to a Level 5 where we literally keep the woods, the forests off-limits to personnel.</s>SESNO: Is there any sense you have right now as to what the outlook is given the weather, the winds and the land usage?</s>AKERS: What we've been told by our experts is a lot of these fires will be put out this winter by the snow.</s>SESNO: OK, Larry Akers, thanks very much.
Emergency Operations Ctr. Spokesman Discusses Montana Wildfires