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.
The International Industrial Talents Education Special (INTENSE) Program to attract foreigners to study and work in Taiwan will provide scholarships and a living allowance of up to NT$440,000 per person for two years beginning in August, Minister of Education Pan Wen-chung (潘文忠) told a meeting of the legislature’s Education and Culture Committee yesterday. Pan was giving an update on the program’s implementation, a review of universities’ efforts to recruit international students and promotion of the Taiwan Huayu Bilingual Exchanges of Selected Talent (BEST) program. Each INTENSE Program student would be awarded a scholarship of up to NT$100,000 per year for up to
BASIC OPERATIONS: About half a dozen navy ships from both countries took part in the days-long exercise based on the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea An unpublicized joint military exercise between Taiwan and the US in the Pacific Ocean last month was carried out in accordance with an international code, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said yesterday. According to a Reuters report citing four unnamed sources, the two nations’ navies last month conducted joint drills in the Western Pacific. The drills were not made public at the time, but “about half-a-dozen navy ships from both sides, including frigates and supply and support vessels, participated in the days-long exercises,” Reuters reported, citing the sources. The drills were designed to practice “basic” operations such as communications, refueling and resupplies,
‘MONEY PIT’: The KMT’s more than NT$2 trillion infrastructure project proposals for eastern Taiwan lack professional input and financial transparency, the DPP said The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus yesterday said it would ask the Executive Yuan to raise a motion to oppose the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus’ infrastructure proposals and prepare to file for a constitutional interpretation if the KMT-dominated legislature forces their passage. The DPP caucus described the three infrastructure plans for transportation links to eastern Taiwan proposed by the KMT as “three money pit projects” that would cost more than NT$2 trillion (US$61.72 billion). It would ask the Executive Yuan to oppose public projects that would drain state financial resources, DPP caucus secretary-general Rosalia Wu (吳思瑤) said. It would also file for
SELF-SUFFICIENCY: The project would only be the beginning, as Taiwan needs at least 120 satellites to ensure uninterrupted communication, Wu Tsung-tsong said The Taiwan Space Agency (TASA) yesterday said it plans to launch six low Earth orbit satellites starting in 2026 as part of the government’s plan to boost the resilience of the nation’s communications. The development of the technology gained attention after Ukrainians were able to access the Internet through Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) CEO Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service, despite their infrastructure being severely damaged in the war with Russia. Two of the satellites would be built by the government, while four would involve cooperation between TASA and private contractors. “Over the past 30 years, the satellite technology in Taiwan has