Firefighters were yesterday battling wildfires up and down the US west coast that had killed 15 people, and forced more than half a million to flee their homes.
The scale of destruction was impossible to count across wide stretches of California, Oregon and Washington cut off from the world by a wall of flames fueled by record heat and intense, dry winds.
The August Complex Fire became the biggest recorded blaze in Californian history on Thursday, after multiple fires in the state’s northwest combined to rip through 300,000 hectares of dry vegetation.
Photo: AFP
More than 1 million hectares had been burned across the whole state so far, a Cal Fire spokesman said on Thursday.
Half a million people have been evacuated in neighboring Oregon.
Oregon Governor Kate Brown said that the amount of land affected in the previous 72 hours was twice the state’s annual average and that at least five towns had been “substantially destroyed.”
Photo: AFP
“We have never seen this amount of uncontained fire across our state,” Brown told a news conference.
Oregon officials confirmed two deaths in the Santiam Canyon region south of Portland, and a third in the Ashland area, near the California border.
Police went door to door to make sure that residents were evacuating the city of Molalla, marking their driveways with spray paint to show that they had left.
“It’s one thing to leave your house, it’s another thing being told that you have to leave,” said Denise Pentz, a resident of the town for 11 years, who was loading her family belongings into a camping trailer.
Among those killed was a one-year-old boy who perished while his parents sustained severe burns as they attempted to flee an inferno about 200km east of Seattle.
“This child’s family and community will never be the same,” Washington Governor Jay Inslee said in a statement on his state’s first fire death of this year.
Police said that the death toll had jumped to 10 in northern California’s Butte County on Thursday.
“We have to report an additional seven deceased individuals were located by our deputies and detectives today,” Butte County Sheriff Captain Derek Bell said.
One unidentified person was killed in far northern California, near the remote rural community of Happy Camp, a Cal Fire spokeswoman told reporters.
Tina Rose, 29, fled her home in central California after witnessing a nearby mountain “glowing red” from looming wildfires.
“It is something we never want to experience again,” she said from her brother-in-law’s crowded home near Fresno.
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