HELL NEAR AN END
Nightmare Calif. fire contained
The deadliest and most destructive blaze in California’s history has finally been contained, more than two weeks after it began, officials said Sunday.
The Camp Fire — named for Camp Creek Road in parched Butte County, where it erupted on Nov. 8 — spread rapidly and consumed some 240 square miles in Northern California, including nearly all of the city of Paradise in a day.
The acreage destroyed is roughly equal to an area the size of Chicago.
But thanks to about seven inches of rain that fell last week, firefighters were able to encircle the blaze.
“It’s certainly good to be done with the containment of this fire, even though there’s still a lot of work to be done moving forward,” Cal Fire spokeswoman Jennifer Erickson said.
Full containment doesn’t mean the fire is out, just that firefighters have surrounded the blaze.
“They’re going to be working on it for months,” Brigitte Foster, a spokeswoman for the Camp Fire unified command unit, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
It’s still unclear what sparked the blaze — which killed at least 85 peo- ple, with 249 still unaccounted for. The number of missing is down from 1,000 just days ago.
Officials continued the grim search for remains in devastated areas amid concerns that heavy rain could cause mudslides and send debris and remains flowing, but that didn’t seem to be a problem on Sunday.
“We just got really lucky,” said Bill Rasch, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
“The rain came down at a slow enough pace and hit the sweet spot — steady rain, not a lot of impact,” he added.
Recovery efforts for those displaced by the fire also continued. Nearly 19,000 buildings, most of them homes, were destroyed and roughly 50,000 people displaced.
On Sunday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency took over an old Toys “R” Us building in Chico that it plans to use as a regional warehouse and distribution center for long-term disaster recovery.
In Southern California, more residents returned to areas that had evacuated amid the Woolsey Fire
At the height of that blaze, which was fully contained on Nov. 21, 250,000 people fled their homes and three died.