Fears of fire ‘mass fatalities’
CREWS were to resume searching for the dead yesterday among blackened ruins left by massive wildfires raging in three western US states, where millions of acres have burned in recent weeks and “mass fatality” incidents are feared in Oregon.
A blitz of wildfires across Oregon, California and Washington has destroyed thousands of homes and a half-dozen small towns this summer, scorching a landscape the size of New Jersey and killing at least 26 people since early August.
After four days of brutally hot, windy weather, the weekend brought calmer winds blowing inland from the Pacific Ocean, and cooler, moister conditions that helped crews make headway against blazes that had burned unchecked earlier in the week.
In Oregon, Governor Kate Brown called the perilous blazes a “once-in-a-generation event”, and the director of Oregon’s office of emergency management, Andrew Phelps, said authorities were bracing for the possibility of “mass fatality” incidents.
“There are going to be a number of fatalities, folks who just couldn’t get warning in time and couldn’t evacuate their homes and get to safety,” Phelps said on Friday.
At least six people have been killed this week in Oregon, according to state officials. Brown has said that dozens of people remain missing across three counties.
Twenty-seven fires were still raging in Oregon and Washington on Saturday, the Bureau of Land Management said on Twitter.
In southern Oregon, an apocalyptic scene of charred residential subdivisions and trailer parks stretched for kilometres along Highway 99 south of Medford through the neighbouring communities of Phoenix and Talent.
In California, tens of thousands of firefighters were battling 28 major wildfires as of Saturday afternoon, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Improving weather conditions had helped them gain a measure of containment over most of the blazes.
The White House said President Donald Trump, a Republican, would meet with federal and California officials today. The president has said that western governors bear some of the blame for intense fire seasons in recent years, accusing them of poor forest management.
Trump’s Democratic opponent in the November election, Joe Biden, linked the conflagrations to climate change, echoing comments made a day earlier by California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Thick smoke and ash from the fires has darkened the sky over the Pacific Northwest since Labor Day, creating some of the world’s worst air-quality levels and driving residents indoors.
More than 4 000 homes and other structures have been incinerated in California alone over the past three weeks.
In Portland, where more than 100 days of political protests have turned increasingly tense in recent weeks, the Multnomah County Sheriff chastised residents for setting up their own checkpoints to stop cars after conspiracy theories spread on social media that members of Black Lives Matter or Antifa were lighting fires. Local officials have called those assertions groundless.
Facebook said that it was removing false claims that the wildfires in Oregon were started by certain groups.
“This is based on confirmation from law enforcement that these rumours are forcing local fire and police agencies to divert resources from fighting the fires and protecting the public,” a Facebook spokesperson said.