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indicating a high wildfire risk throughout western South Dakota and the northwestern corner of Nebraska.
• The blaze is one of three large wildfires sparked by lightning earlier in the week in the tinder-dry northwestern corner of Nebraska, a sparsely populated area of rolling prairie hills, badlands and stands of Ponderosa pines.
• Two fires burning to the west -- one south of Chadron and another between Harrison and Crawford -- were being measured together on Saturday. As of Saturday night, they had burned 87,555 acres and were 47 percent contained, said Cyd Janssen, public information officer with the fire's operation center.

• The expansion of the flames did force the evacuation overnight of Whitney, a Nebraska town of about 75 people, but firefighters managed to stop the flames within a mile of the small town.
• Crews were beginning mop-up operations on the third fire, a collection of fires that moved through Keith, Lincoln and McPherson counties, which was 15 miles long, 2 miles wide and 90 percent contained, Conrad said Saturday night.
• Gov. Dave Heineman announced Saturday that he planned to tour the scorched areas on Sunday and meet with local and state responders and firefighters in the Rushville, Crawford and Chadron areas.
• Sheila French, a spokeswoman for the operations center for the two most western fires, said hundreds of firefighters poured into the area Friday night and into Saturday, taking the number of people fighting the fires from 214 on Friday to nearly 500 and counting Saturday.
• "We have vehicles from Alaska, Arizona ... New York; there are people from all over the country here," French said.
• Three minor injuries have been reported from the fires. No deaths have been reported, but authorities said a 64-year-old woman died of an apparent heart attack after she was evacuated from her home Wednesday night.
• At least one Nebraska home and one South Dakota home have been destroyed in the fires, officials said, and dozens of farm buildings are believed to have been destroyed.
• "But we won't have any kind of numbers on that until officials can get in the area and see what we're dealing with," Fawl said.
• A cold front was expected to move through the region late Saturday night, bringing much-anticipated cooler temperatures and a favorable shift in winds, French said. But the system wasn't expected to bring much rain, and lightning could spark more fires in the drought-parched region.

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