LOS ANGELES, California - The death toll in northern California's so-called "Camp Fire" rose to 87, officials said late Saturday, adding that the blaze was almost fully under control.
Cal Fire, the state fire authority, said in its latest bulletin that the fire - which broke out on November 8 - was 98 percent contained.
The office of the Butte County Sheriff said that 249 people remained unaccounted for - a steep drop from 474 missing reported earlier in the day.
It added that only 54 of the fatalities have been identified.
More than 153,000 acres have been torched, with nearly 14,000 homes and hundreds of other structures destroyed by the powerful blaze, California's deadliest and most destructive fire ever.
Previously the death toll had been put at 84.
Rain that soaked the Butte County fire area in the past days helped douse the remaining flames, but also made it more difficult for crews searching for bodies.
"Areas experiencing significant rainfall following a wildfire are at risk for debris flow and flash flooding," the Sheriff's office warned.
Cal Fire said that the remaining uncontained fire "is isolated in steep and rugged terrain where it is unsafe for firefighters to access due to the heavy rains."
source: news.abs-cbn.com
CHICO, California - Northern California residents left homeless by the deadliest, most destructive wildfire in state history braced for a new bout of misery on Tuesday from showers expected to plunge encampments of evacuees into rain-soaked fields of mud.
The impending Pacific storm was also certain to hinder search teams sifting through ash and rubble for remains of additional victims in a disaster that already has claimed at least 81 lives and left hundreds more missing.
As much as 6 inches (15 cm) of rain was expected to fall over several days starting early on Wednesday around the town of Paradise, a community of nearly 27,000 people, many of them retirees, that was largely obliterated by the Camp Fire.
Forecasters said there was a slight risk of rains unleashing rivers of mud and debris down flame-scorched slopes stripped of vegetation by the blaze, which has burned across 151,000 acres (61,107 hectares) of the Sierra foothills north of San Francisco.
But because of mass evacuations still in effect since the fire erupted on Nov. 8, few if any people were believed to be in harm's way should any debris flows materialize, according to National Weather Service (NWS) hydrologist Cindy Matthews.
She also said due to the volcanic soil and relatively shallow slopes found in the fire zone, the ground is unlikely to become saturated enough for hillsides to give way to landslides that can occur in newly burned areas after heavy rains.
However, authorities in Southern California warned residents in areas burned by a pair of recent large wildfires in the coastal foothills and mountains northwest of Los Angeles to be wary of mud-flow hazards from the same storm this week. One of those blazes, the Woolsey Fire, killed 3 people.
While the showers will prove a boon to firefighters still laboring to suppress the flames, the storm will heighten the discomfort factor for many displaced residents who are essentially camping rather than staying in emergency shelters.
"There are people still living in tents," Sacramento-based NWS meteorologist Eric Kurth said in a telephone interview. "That's certainly not going to be pleasant with the rain, and we might get some wind gusting up to 40 to 45 miles per hour (64 to 72 km per hour)."
'MUD CITY'
One of those evacuees, Kelly Boyer, lost his home in Paradise and was sharing a tent with a friend at an encampment outside a Walmart store in nearby Chico, where overnight low temperatures have fallen to just above freezing.
Boyer said he was grateful for wooden pallets and plastic tarps donated by local residents to evacuees to help keep their tents off the ground and dry when the rains come, though he said the showers would still make a mess.
"It's going to be mud city," he told Reuters.
The rains, however, will help dispel heavy smoke that has lingered in the air.
"We're really expecting the air quality to improve. That's the bright side for those people up there," he said.
Meanwhile, smoke from the recent California wildfires has drifted across the country to the East Coast, where it was widely noticed in the form of a brownish, orange haze in the sky and was credited with unusually vibrant sunsets on Monday.
"So if you thought it was just a bit hazy this afternoon, we have a California smoke plume moving through," retired NWS meteorologist Gary Szatkowski, who continues to track weather phenomenon from his home in New Jersey, wrote on Twitter.
Most of the transcontinental smoke plume, illustrated on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration map he posted on Twitter, was "a couple of miles up" in the atmosphere, high enough to be carried east by the jet stream.
The Camp Fire incinerated some 13,000 homes in and around Paradise, mostly during the first night of the blaze when gale-force winds drove flames through drought-parched scrub and trees into the town with little warning, forcing residents to flee for their lives.
The Butte County Sheriff's Office has tentatively identified 64 of the 79 victims whose remains have so far been recovered.
Meanwhile, the missing-persons list compiled by the sheriff's office was revised downward to 699 names on Tuesday, from a high of more than 1,200 over the weekend.
The number has fluctuated dramatically over the past week as more individuals were reported missing or as some initially listed as unaccounted for either turned up alive or were confirmed dead.
Buffer lines have been carved around 75 percent of the fire's perimeter and full containment is expected by the end of the month, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
The number of residents needing temporary shelter was unclear but as many as 52,000 people were under evacuation orders at the height of the firestorm last week.
The cause of the Camp and Woolsey fires are under investigation but electric utilities reported localized equipment problems around the time both blazes broke out.
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PARADISE, California - The number of people listed as missing in one of California's deadliest wildfires has skyrocketed past 600, authorities said Thursday, as the remains of seven additional victims were found by rescuers.
Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said the number of missing had more than doubled during the day to 631 as investigators went back and checked emergency calls made when the fire broke out a week ago.
"I want you to understand that the chaos we were dealing with was extraordinary" when the fire started, he told journalists, in explaining the staggering new number.
The seven additional victims brings to 63 the number of people who have died in the so-called Camp Fire in northern California.
At least three other people have died in southern California in another blaze dubbed the Woolsey Fire.
President Donald Trump is set to visit California on Saturday to meet with victims of the wildfires believed to be the worst in the state's history.
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PARADISE, California - National Guard troops joined the grim search on Wednesday for more victims in the ruins of an incinerated northern California town while the death toll climbed to 56 in the most deadly and destructive wildfire in the state's history.
The latest fatality count was announced as authorities released a revised list of 130 people reported missing by loved ones after flames largely obliterated the Sierra foothills town of Paradise, about 175 miles (280 km) north of San Francisco, last Thursday.
The majority on the list were over the age of 65. Nearly 230 people were initially reported as missing in the killer blaze, dubbed the Camp Fire. Most of those who remain unaccounted for are from Paradise, once home to 27,000 people.
More than 8,900 homes and other buildings burned to the ground in and around Paradise, and an estimated 50,000 people remained under evacuation orders in the area.
Adding to the misery of some survivors was an outbreak of norovirus, a highly contagious gastrointestinal illness, at a shelter housing about 200 evacuees in the nearby city of Chico.
Public health agency spokeswoman Lisa Almaguer said at least 20 people may have caught the virus.
The footprint of the 6-day-old fire grew to 135,000 acres (55,000 hectares) as of Wednesday, even as diminished winds and rising humidity helped firefighters shore up containment lines around more than a third of the perimeter.
Still, the ghostly expanse of empty lots covered in ash and strewn with twisted wreckage and debris made a strong impression on Governor Jerry Brown, US Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and other officials who toured the devastation on Wednesday.
"This is one of the worst disasters I've seen in my career, hands down," Brock Long, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told reporters in Chico.
"It looks like a war zone. It is a war zone," Brown said.
NO FINGER POINTING
After visiting some of California's earlier wildfire zones in August, Zinke blamed "gross mismanagement of forests" because of timber harvest restrictions that he said were supported by "environmental terrorist groups."
But pressed by reporters on Wednesday, Zinke demurred. "Now is really not the time to point fingers," he said. "It is a time for America to stand together."
The blaze, fueled by thick, drought-desiccated scrub, has capped 2 back-to-back catastrophic wildfire seasons in California that scientists largely attribute to prolonged drought they say is symptomatic of climate change.
Lawyers for some of the victims claimed in a lawsuit filed on Wednesday that lax equipment maintenance by an electric utility was the proximate cause of the fire, which officially remains under investigation.
The Butte County disaster coincided with a flurry of blazes in Southern California, most notably the Woolsey Fire, which has killed at least 2 people, destroyed more than 500 structures and displaced about 200,000 people in the mountains and foothills near the Malibu coast west of Los Angeles.
On Wednesday, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said the body of a possible third victim was found there in a burned-out dwelling. Cal Fire officials said that blaze was 52 percent contained as of Wednesday night.
In Butte County, the search for more human remains kicked into high gear as a National Guard contingent of 50 military police officers joined dozens of search-and-recovery workers and at least 22 cadaver dogs, Sheriff Kory Honea said.
The remains of 8 more fire victims were found on Wednesday, raising the official number of fatalities to 56 - far exceeding the previous record from a single wildfire in California history - 29 people killed by the Griffith Park fire in Los Angeles in 1933.
The Camp Fire also stands as 1 of the deadliest US wildfires since the turn of the last century. More than 80 people perished in the Big Burn firestorm that swept the Northern Rockies in August of 1910.
TRACKING THE MISSING
Butte County Sheriff's spokeswoman Megan McMann said the list of 130 missing would fluctuate from day to day as more names are added and others are removed, either because they turn up safe or end up identified among the dead.
Sheriff Honea invited relatives of the missing to provide DNA samples to compare against samples taken from newly recovered remains in hopes of speeding up identification of the dead. But he acknowledged it was possible some of the missing might never be found.
Authorities attributed the magnitude of casualties to the staggering speed with which the fire struck Paradise. Wind-driven flames roared through town so swiftly that residents were forced to flee for their lives. Some victims were found in or around the burned-out wreckage of their vehicles.
Anna Dise, a resident of Butte Creek Canyon west of Paradise, told KRCR TV her father, Gordon Dise, 66, died when he ran back inside to gather belongings and their house collapsed on him.
Dise said she could not flee in her car because the tires had melted. To survive, she hid overnight in a neighbor's pond with her dogs.
"It was so fast," Dise recounted of the fire. "I didn't expect it to move so fast."
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PARADISE, California - Search teams have recovered the remains of at least 42 people killed by a devastating wildfire that largely incinerated the town of Paradise in northern California, making it the deadliest single wildland blaze in state history, authorities said on Monday.
The latest death toll, up from 29 tallied over the weekend, was announced by Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea at an evening news conference in the nearby city of Chico after authorities located the remains of 13 additional victims from a blaze dubbed the Camp Fire.
That fire already ranked as the most destructive on record in California, having leveled more than 7,100 homes and other buildings since it erupted on Thursday in the Sierra foothills of Butte County, about 175 miles (280 km) north of San Francisco.
Honea said the number of people listed as missing in the disaster remained officially at 228, but added that his office had received more than 1,500 requests for "welfare checks" from people concerned about the fate of their loved ones. He said his office had managed to confirm the safety of the individuals in question in 231 of those cases so far.
More than 15,000 more structures remained listed as threatened on Monday in an area so thick with smoke that visibility was reduced in some places to less than half a mile.
The bulk of the destruction and loss of life occurred in and around the town of Paradise, where flames reduced most of the buildings to ash and charred rubble on Thursday night, just hours after the blaze erupted.
The 42 confirmed fatalities marks the largest loss of life ever from a single wildland fire in California, Honea said. It also far surpasses the all-time record number of deaths from a California wildfire - 29 in 1933 from the Griffith Park blaze in Los Angeles.
Authorities reported two more people perished over the weekend in a separate blaze, dubbed the Woolsey Fire, that has destroyed 370 structures and displaced some 200,000 people in the mountains and foothills near Southern California's Malibu coast, west of Los Angeles.
President Donald Trump on Monday approved a major disaster declaration for California at the request of Governor Jerry Brown, hastening the availability of federal emergency assistance to fire-stricken regions of the state.
The fires have spread with an erratic intensity that has strained resources and kept firefighters struggling to keep up with the flames while catching many residents by surprise.
The remains of some of the Camp Fire victims were found in burned-out vehicles that were overrun by walls of fire as evacuees tried to flee by car in panic, only to be trapped in deadly knots of traffic gridlock on Thursday night.
"It was very scary," Mayor Jody Jones recounted of her family's own harrowing escape from their home as fire raged all around them.
"It took a long time to get out. There was fire on both sides of the car. You could feel the heat coming in through the car," she told CNN. Jones said her family is now living in their mobile home parked in a vacant lot.
Honea said authorities have brought in 13 special search-and-recovery teams to seek out any further victims from the Camp Fire, and have requested additional cadaver-dog crews to assist in the search for human remains.
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PARADISE, United States - Search teams scoured the carnage of California's most destructive ever wildfire for victims on Sunday, as the state-wide death toll rose to 26 with high winds hampering the effort to rescue property and save lives.
Firefighters took advantage of a brief calm overnight to make headway against the multiple blazes, but conditions were expected to be hellish on Sunday with winds reaching as high as 70 miles (110 kilometers) an hour.
In fire zones north and south, acrid smoke blanketed the sky for miles, the sun barely visible. On the ground, cars caught in the blaze were reduced to mangled metal carcasses, while power lines were gnawed by the flames.
The largest inferno -- the so-called "Camp Fire" in the northern foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains -- has destroyed 6,700 homes, business and other buildings in the town of Paradise, effectively wiping it off the map.
At least 23 people have lost their lives in and around the community of 27,000, according to an official count by authorities.
An AFP journalist in Magalia, a 10-mile drive north of Paradise, saw workers from a local mortuary team recover another body which was put into a blue bag and loaded onto a hearse.
Only two Californian wildfires have claimed more lives -- the most recent more than a quarter-century ago.
At the southern end of the state, where the "Woolsey Fire" is threatening mansions and mobile homes alike in the coastal celebrity redoubt of Malibu, the death toll has been limited to two victims found in a vehicle on a private driveway.
Los Angeles County Fire chief Daryl Osby told reporters of his gratitude to firefighters "who've done all they could do save tens of thousands of people's lives and thousands of people's homes."
'NEW NORMAL'
Rescuers spent Saturday collecting bodies around Paradise and placing them in a black hearse. Charred body parts were transported by bucket, while intact remains were carried in body bags.
At the Holly Hills Mobile Estate the mobile homes had been reduced to smoldering piles of debris. Yellow police tape delineated spots that were tagged "Doe C" and "Doe D," a grim marker of the bodies that had recently been removed.
Locals fled the danger, but police told AFP some farmers returned to check on their cattle.
Fanned by strong winds, the "Camp Fire" has so far scorched 109,000 acres (45,000 hectares) and is 25 percent contained, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) said. So far, three of the more than 4,000 firefighters deployed have been injured.
They estimate they will need three weeks to fully contain the blaze.
Evacuation orders have been issued to more than 250,000 people across California, with authorities urging residents not to ignore warnings to flee.
"We're entering a new normal. Things are not the way they were 10 years ago," Ventura County Fire Department Chief Mark Lawrenson said.
"The rate of spread is exponentially more than it used to be. Please heed evacuation warnings. Do not stay in your homes to try to defend them."
'DANGEROUSLY WRONG'
Almost 6,000 miles away, President Donald Trump, in France for World War I commemorations, drew fierce criticism for an unsympathetic reaction to the devastation.
"There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor," Trump tweeted, threatening to withdraw federal support.
Brian Rice, the head of the California Professional Firefighters, slammed the tweet as "ill-informed, ill-timed and demeaning to those who are suffering as well as the men and women on the front lines."
He said the president's claim that forest policies were mismanaged "is dangerously wrong."
The tweet also drew political criticism. Republican Senator Cory Gardner told ABC News on Sunday: "I don't think it's appropriate to threaten funding.
"That's not going to happen. Funding will be available. It always is available to our people wherever they are, whatever disaster they are facing."
MALIBU MANSIONS IN FLAMES
In southern California, the "Woolsey Fire" engulfed parts of Thousand Oaks, where the community is still shell-shocked after a Marine Corps veteran shot dead 12 people in a country music bar on Wednesday.
It has consumed around 83,000 acres, destroyed at least 177 buildings and was ten percent contained, Cal Fire said Sunday.
The blaze reached the Paramount Ranch, destroying sets used for hundreds of productions including HBO'S sci-fi western "Westworld," network officials said.
Keegan Gibbs, 33, was crushed to find his childhood Malibu home had been consumed by flames.
"Malibu is a really small community and gets a bad rap for being this kind of elitist, snobby place, and it's exactly the opposite," Gibbs told the Los Angeles Times.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
