Kentucky's wildfire crisis took a deadly turn over the weekend.
The state says an Oldham County firefighter.
Sergeant Thomas Pesquet Jr. Was hurt fighting a fire in Goshen on Saturday.
He died later at Norton Brownsburg Borough Hospital.
He was 53 years old.
The state says there are 16 active wildfires, mostly in the eastern and southern parts of the state.
Now, active means firefighters are fighting them, but they continue to spread.
That number is down from 31 on Thursday.
36 fires are now contained, meaning they're no longer spreading, but they still require action.
And 76 are controlled, meaning they are no longer a risk.
The fires have affected almost 27,000 acres.
And we have this video shot by Matt Weissmann, judge, executive of Magoffin County.
Why are man says he rode his four wheeler behind his house and found the wildfire you see here.
We spoke with the Kentucky Division of Forestry to learn about the progress that's been made and the concerns that remain.
We have made really wonderful progress and we're getting that number of active fires to decrease, which is excellent news, not only for our crews but also for citizens of the Commonwealth that are being directly impacted by these wildland fires.
So that's excellent.
But that doesn't mean we're out of the woods yet.
You know, we are staying hyper vigilant as we have brought in members from the National Weather Service to provide us of weather updates and using the most up to date prediction models of what incoming weather is going to look like.
And so we have a pretty good idea of what the weather is going to do within this week.
Proceeding with these weather models heading into this week is that our relative humidity is going to drop into critical levels.
So here in the state of Kentucky, when we get around 25%, relative humidity or lower, that is really not good news when it comes to wildfire.
And then we also know that we're going to be receiving some above average temperatures for this part of the year.
And so when you put additional heat and low relative humidity together, that's adding up for a sticky situation and when it comes to wildfire.
So given that information, we're saying, you know, hyper vigilant and aware of our situation and we have teams prepped just in case that we do need additional folks on the on the line as and I can't say it enough that it really does take a village when it comes to fire mobilization.
Crews and equipment have arrived from Oregon, Idaho and Texas, and the Kentucky Division of Forestry expects more reinforcements from Utah later this week.