42 dead in California’s deadliest wildfires

At least 42 people have died in a wildfire in Northern California, making it the deadliest blaze in state history.

Authorities reported 13 more fatalities as the search for bodies continued.

Victims were found in burnedout cars, in the smouldering ruins of their homes or next to their vehicles, apparently overcome by smoke and flames before they could escape.

In some cases, there were only charred fragments of bone, so small that investigators used a wire basket to sift and sort them.

Hundreds of people were unaccounted for, by the sheriff’s reckoning, four days after the fire swept over the town of Paradise and practically wiped it off the map.

The blaze was part of an outbreak of wildfires on both ends of the state. Together, they were blamed for 44 deaths, including two in celebrity-studded Malibu in Southern California, where firefighters appeared to be gaining ground against a roughly 143-square-mile blaze that destroyed at least 370 structures, with hundreds more feared lost.

Some of the thousands of people forced from their homes by the blaze were allowed to return, and authorities reopened US 101, a major highway through the fire zone in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

Malibu celebrities and mobile-home dwellers in nearby mountains were slowly learning whether their homes had been spared or reduced to ash.

In Northern California, fire crews still fighting the blaze that obliterated Paradise contended with wind gusts of up to 40mph overnight. The fire had grown to 177 square miles and was 25% contained, authorities said.

The fire has now surpassed the 1933 Griffith Park disaster that killed 31 people.

Picture: AP. Chris and Nancy Brown amid the remains of their home.