Kim, Kanye donate $500,000 to California wildfire relief efforts

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.

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Californians left homeless by wildfire brace for heavy rain and mud

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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Number of missing in California fire jumps past 600

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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At least 56 killed, 130 missing in California's deadliest wildfire

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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Northern California wildfire kills 42 to rank as deadliest in state history

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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California fire death toll rises to 23

PARADISE, United States - The death toll from the most destructive fire to hit California rose to 23 on Saturday as rescue workers recovered more bodies of people killed by the devastating blaze.

Firefighters are battling raging fires at both ends of the state, but there is little hope of containing the flames anytime soon.

"Today, 14 additional bodies were located, which brings our total number to 23," Sheriff Kory Honea told a news conference.

Ten of the bodies were found in the town of Paradise while four were discovered in the Concow area, both in Butte County, Honea said.

Rescuers could be seen removing remains over a period of several hours in Paradise and placing them in a black hearse. Pieces of bodies were transported by bucket, while intact remains were carried in body bags.

So far, a total of 19 of the people killed in what authorities have dubbed the "Camp Fire" have been reported in Paradise, where more than 6,700 buildings -- most of them residences -- have been consumed by the late-season inferno.

From miles around, acrid smoke could be seen in the sky around Paradise, the sun barely visible. On the ground, cars were reduced to metal carcasses, while power lines were also gnawed by the flames.

Locals fled the danger, but police told AFP some farmers returned to check on their cattle.

"The magnitude of destruction we have seen is really unbelievable and heartbreaking, and our hearts go to everybody who has been affected by this," said Mark Ghilarducci, the director of the California Office of Emergency Services.

Governor-elect Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency to provide assistance to the hardest-hit areas in the fire-prone state.

The fast-moving Camp Fire blaze in the north broke out early Thursday.

Fanned by strong winds, it has so far scorched 100,000 acres (40,500 hectares) and is 20 percent contained, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) said Saturday. So far, three of the more than 3,200 firefighters deployed have been injured.

They estimate they will need three weeks to fully contain the blaze.

Local power authorities have told state officials an outage occurred near the spot where the fire erupted, The Sacramento Bee reported, but there is still no official cause of the Camp Fire blaze.

Trump, who was in France for World War I commemorations, drew criticism online for his somewhat unsympathetic reaction to the devastation earlier on Saturday.

"There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor," Trump tweeted.

"Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!"

MALIBU MANSIONS IN FLAMES

In southern California, more wildfires burned, including one just north of Los Angeles and another in Ventura County near Thousand Oaks, where a Marine Corps veteran shot dead 12 people in a country music bar on Wednesday.

Authorities said some 200,000 people are under mandatory evacuation orders, including the entire city of Malibu.

The "Woolsey Fire" had consumed around 69,000 acres, destroyed at least 150 homes and was so far not contained, the Ventura County Fire Department said, adding that evacuation orders were issued for some 88,000 homes in the county and neighboring Los Angeles County.

"We heard this was coming so we set up the sprinklers and we hosed the whole house down," said Malibu resident Patrick Henry. "We pretty much had enough time to get the dogs in the trunk."

Malibu is one of the most in-demand locations in California for stars seeking privacy and luxury.

Reality TV star Kim Kardashian West, who lives just north of coastal Malibu, revealed she was forced to flee her home.

"I heard the flames have hit our property at our home in Hidden Hills but now are more contained and have stopped at the moment," she said on Twitter. "I just pray the winds are in our favor."

Actor Martin Sheen, briefly reported missing by his actor son Charlie, was also forced to evacuate.

"We're fine, we're at Zuma Beach and we're probably going to sleep in the car tonight," Martin Sheen told Fox News 11, adding that it was the worst fire he had seen in 48 years of living in Malibu.

The wildfire reached Paramount Ranch, destroying the Western Town sets used for hundreds of productions including HBO'S sci-fi western "Westworld," officials and the network said.

Director Guillermo del Toro tweeted that Bleak House, his museum of horror movie memorabilia, was also in the path of the flames.

UTTER DEVASTATION

In Paradise, the flames destroyed hundreds of homes, a hospital, a gas station, several restaurants and numerous vehicles, officials said.

Mandatory evacuation orders were issued for more than 52,000 people in the scenic area in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

The National Weather Service said Saturday that strong winds and dry conditions were to continue through the weekend.

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Why Australians see the Philippines as a paradise

An Australian news site has listed nine of the most beautiful places in the Philippines.

The list, published on News.com.au, includes the majestic beaches of Boracay, Camiguin, Siargao and Caramoan; the rock formations in El Nido, and the rolling hills of Bohol.

"FROM lush, thick jungle to dramatic mountain ranges and glistening white sand beaches, the Philippines is home to more than 7000 idyllic islands, waiting to be explored," the report said.

Here nine destinations that make the Philippines a paradise for Australians:

Mobile users can view the desktop version of the slideshow here.

1. Boracay

"This once secluded island has quickly become a tourist hotspot." Photo from the Department of Tourism

 source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Palawan is world's 'most beautiful' island: website

MANILA – The Philippines’ very own Palawan island has been dubbed by a popular news and opinion website as “the most beautiful island in the world.”

Carly Ledbetter of The Huffington Post wrote an article about Palawan published on the website on November 24.

Titled “Palawan, The Most Beautiful Island In The World, Is Sheer Perfection,” the article focused on what the province has to offer.

It also featured several photos of Palawan, from Kayangan Lake to the island’s many beaches and “incredible and rare” wildlife.

“It’s hard to believe the Philippines are an under-appreciated tropical travel destination, especially with their extraordinary hiking, biking, beaches and of course – islands that are THIS beautiful,” wrote Ledbetter, who is the Associate Lifestyle Editor of The Huffington Post.

“And while we’d like to visit every single island in the Philippines, there’s one island in particular we’re zeroing in on – Palawan, a hidden piece of paradise that was recently named ‘The Top Island in the World’ by Conde Nast Traveler’s Reader Choice Awards,” she added.

“There, beautiful blue water mixes with emerald green, jungle-filled mountains that appear to rise up from the ocean, and small fishing villages dot the island. Together with its neighboring islands, it creates the Palawan province, aka Paradise.”

Last month, the award-winning US travel magazine Conde Nast Traveler released the results of its 27th annual Readers’ Choice Awards.


Palawan, with over 76,000 votes, beat out the likes of Kiawah Island in South Carolina, Maui in Hawaii, Bazaruto Archipelago in Mozambique, the Great Barrier Reef and Whitsunday Islands in Australia, and Santorini in Greece.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com