LOS ANGELES - Kim Kardashian and Kanye West on Wednesday donated $500,000 to firefighters and victims of a massive Southern California wildfire that came close to destroying the celebrity couple's own multimillion-dollar mansion.
Kardashian, appearing on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," said she and West hired private firefighters to protect their home and others in their neighborhood in rural Calabasas, north of Los Angeles.
Kardashian, West, and their 3 children were among thousands of people forced to evacuate their homes during the 93,000-acre (37,635-hectare) Woolsey fire 2 weeks ago that spread into coastal Malibu, destroying 1,500 buildings and killing 3 people.
Kardashian, a businesswoman and star of reality show "Keeping Up With the Kardashians," said the flames "got to our gate. We are still not in our home now. The smoke, the smell is too intense."
She said the couple felt blessed at being able to hire private firefighters.
"Our house is right on the end of a big park," she said. "We were able to get private firefighters... and they saved our home and saved our neighborhood. I had them make sure they controlled every house on the edge, so it wasn't just our home."
Kardashian, West, and the rapper's fashion company Yeezy and sportswear company Adidas, which makes his sneakers, donated $400,000 to victims of the fire and to California firefighters.
They also donated a further $100,000 to firefighter Michael Williams, who fought the blaze in his neighborhood after narrowly escaping from his own burning home.
The Woolsey fire is now 93 percent contained. A separate fire in northern California destroyed more than 12,000 homes and businesses in the town of Paradise and killed 81 people. Another 700 are still unaccounted for almost 2 weeks after the blaze swept through the town, beginning on Nov. 8.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
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, 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.
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