Amy Sheppard packed her belongings into a plastic garbage bag as rain dripped around her, readying to move on from a field by a Walmart where thousands of evacuees had taken refuge from a deadly northern California wildfire.
Sheppard, her sister and one-year-old niece were looking to move into a dry hotel after camping in the field for four days. They lost their home in Magalia, California, and the jewelry maker teared up as she thought about what was next.
“This rain is making it so hard,” the 38-year-old said.
Rain falling on Wednesday in some areas of northern California was expected to help crews fighting a deadly wildfire.
However, it could also raise the risk of flash floods, complicate efforts to recover remains and make life even more difficult for people like Sheppard who have nowhere to go.
Heavier rain was expected later in the day in the burn area, which is about 225km north of San Francisco, where the Camp Fire has killed at least 83 people, including two victims who were found on Wednesday in burned homes.
The blaze also destroyed more than 13,000 homes.
Officials said that 563 people were still unaccounted for.
“The rain is really a double-edged sword for this fire,” California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokesman Rick Carhart said.
Searchers have “been able to sift through this really fine ash, and when rain gets onto that really fine ash, it turns it into sort of a muddy muck and makes it a lot more difficult,” he said.
The wildfire that started two weeks ago has torched an area in Butte County about the size of Chicago — nearly 622km2 — and was 85 percent contained.
California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services spokesman Eric Lamoureux said that state officials would start removing hazardous waste from the burn area “beginning next week.”
“This will take several months,” he said. “That ash is still toxic.”
Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday made a surprise visit to weary firefighters, providing encouragement and helping serve breakfast.
“I wanted to let you know how much I appreciate all the work that you do,” he told firefighters during a brief speech.
The 71-year-old actor also slammed US President Donald Trump for blaming the wildfire on poor forest management, telling firefighters: “You are tough to not only fight the fires, but you are tough to listen to all this crap.”
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.