Horror find for rescue teams

THE death toll in the bushfire that tore through a Northern California community has risen to 23 and 35 people are still missing.

Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said 14 additional bodies were found on Saturday, three days after the fire broke out. He says some of the victims were found in cars and in houses.

He said an additional search and rescue team was being brought in to search for remains.

The fire has become the third-deadliest in California history. Residents who stayed behind to try to save their property or who managed to get back to their neighbourhoods in the town of Paradise found cars incinerated and homes reduced to rubble.

Entire neighbourhoods were levelled by a blaze that threatened to explode again with the same fury that largely incinerated the foothill town.

The flames razed more than 6700 buildings, almost all of them homes, making it California’s most destructive bushfire since record-keeping began. Sheriff’s deputies recovered human remains from at least five homes as they went house-to-house in Paradise looking for the missing.

The blaze grew to 400sqkm but crews made gains and it was partially contained, officials said.

People sidestepped metal that melted off cars and JetSkis and donned masks as they surveyed ravaged neighbourhoods despite an evacuation order for all of Paradise, a town of 27,000 founded in the 1800s. Some cried when they saw nothing was left.

Abandoned, charred vehicles cluttered the main thoroughfare, evidence of the panicked evacuation as the bushfire tore through Thursday. The dead were found mostly inside their cars or and outside vehicles and homes.

State officials put the total number of people forced from their homes by California’s fires at more than 200,000. Evacuation orders included the entire city of Malibu that is home to some of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

President Donald Trump issued an emergency declaration providing federal funding for fires on both ends of the state. He later threatened to withhold payments to California, claiming its forest management is “so poor.”

Mr Trump tweeted on Saturday that “there is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly fires in California”.

Mr Trump said “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!”