(Reuters) - Officials opened an investigation on Monday of an airplane tanker crash in Utah that caused the year's first two deaths among crews fighting U.S. wildfires, while hundreds of evacuees from a New Mexico blaze that is the nation's biggest this season returned home.
The firefighting plane went down on Sunday afternoon on a forested mountainside in the Hamlin Valley area of southwestern Utah while on a mission to drop chemical fire retardant on an 8,000-acre (3,237-hectare) blaze along the Nevada-Utah border.