California counts cost with 42 dead and 230 missing as wildfire lays Paradise to waste
Bodies of fleeing victims found by their cars in ashes of town wiped off the map
The dead were found in burntout cars, in the smouldering ruins of their homes or next to their vehicles, overcome by smoke and flames before they could get behind the wheel and escape.
In some cases there were only charred fragments of bone, so small that coroner’s investigators used a wire basket to sift and sort them.
Forty-two people were confirmed dead in the wildfires that razed the Northern California town of Paradise and its outlying areas to the ground in the state’s deadliest blaze. The search for bodies continued on Monday.
The sheriff’s office said up to 230 people were still unaccounted for, four days after the fire swept through the town of 27,000 and wiped it off the map, with flames so fierce that authorities brought in a mobile DNA lab and forensic specialists to help identify the dead.
Meanwhile, a landowner near where the blaze began, Betsy Ann Cowley, said she got an email from Pacific Gas and Electric the day before the fire last week telling her that crews needed to come on to her property because its power lines were causing sparks.
The utilities company made no comment on the email after the blaze and state officials said the cause of the inferno was under investigation.
As the search continued, friends and relatives of the missing called hospitals, police, shelters and the coroners’ offices, hoping to find out what had become of their loved ones.
Paradise was a popular retirement community and about a quarter of the population was more than 65 years old.
Tad Teays awaited word on his mother, 90, who suffers from dementia. Darlina Duarte was desperate for information about her half-brother, a diabetic who was housebound because he had lost his legs.
And Barbara Hall tried in vain to find out whether her aunt and uncle, who are in their eighties and nineties, made it out alive from the town.
“Did they make it in their car? Did they get away? I just don’t know,” Ms Hall said. She said they had only a landline and calls were not going through.
The blaze was part of an outbreak of wildfires at both ends of the state.
The death toll includes two in Malibu in Southern California, where firefighters appeared to be gaining ground against a blaze burning across about 370 square kilometres, which destroyed at least 370 buildings.
Some of the thousands of people forced from their homes by the blaze have been allowed to return and authorities reopened US 101, a major motorway through the fire zone in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
More than 8,000 firefighters statewide were battling wildfires that have scorched more than 840 sq km.
In Northern California, crews still fighting the blaze that consumed Paradise dealt with flames that jumped 100 metres across Lake Oroville. The fire is was only 25 per cent contained, authorities said.
But there were signs of some sense of order returning to Paradise. American flags were stuck into the ground on both sides of the road at the town limits to raise morale among firefighters that have battled the flames since Thursday.