Troops search for 130 missing in California blaze
PARADISE (Cal i fornia): US National Guard troops scoured the ruins of the town of Paradise for any sign of 130 people still missing in California’s deadliest wildfire on record as authorities said the death toll had risen to 56.
The “Camp Fire” blaze obliterated the Sierra foothills town of Paradise, once home to 27,000 people, last Thursday. Most of those still missing in and around town, which lies about 280km north of San Francisco, are above the age of 65.
The surface area of the fire had grown to 55,000ha by Wednesday evening, 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.
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”.
Pressed by reporters on Wednesday, Zinke demurred.
“Now is really not the time to point fingers. It is a time for America to stand together.”
The blaze, fuelled by thick, drought-desiccated scrub, has capped two back-to-back catastrophic wildfire seasons in California that scientists largely attribute to prolonged drought they say is symptomatic of climate change.