It was just a fireball and traveled so fast.
I just saw flames all up on the hill behind my house.
It was Armageddon, I'll tell you, the fire coming in and burning all around us.
Alaska, Arizona, California, Montana, Oregon, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Greece, Russia.
These are just some of the places where in recent years, wildfires have raged out of control.
NASA satellites detect more than a million large fires worldwide every year.
The Western United States, for example, has seen larger fires in each of the last several years and more intense burning, and many times as fire spread faster, making them more difficult to put out and more dangerous for the communities who live in that vicinity.
In many cases, the blazes are set by human activity, but sometimes policy fuels the flames too.
Consider California, the state's forests are overgrown in part because of past federal policies of putting out wildfires rather than letting them burn.
Some of these policies were enacted in response to a devastating fire in 1910, in which millions of acres burned more than 80 people died.
