Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Searches continue in Calif. wildfire
As officials check for bodies, survivors try to contact loved ones
PARADISE, Calif. — The death toll from the Camp fire in the Northern California town of Paradise jumped to 42 Monday, making the deadliest fire in state history, as President Donald Trump approved a major disaster declaration.
Officials said they recovered the remains of 13 additional victims Monday as teams continued search the burned-out remains of thousands of lost homes.
Trump’s move came just two days after he criticized California, erroneously claiming that poor forest management caused the fires of the last week and threatened to cut off funding. His comments were met with widespread outrage from both California officials and firefighters.
But on Monday, Trump struck a conciliatory note.
“I just approved an expedited request for a Major Disaster Declaration for the State of California,” he wrote on Twitter. “Wanted to respond quickly in order to alleviate some of the incredible suffering going on. I am with you all the way. God Bless all of the victims and families affected.”
Gov. Jerry Brown sought the declaration Sunday, as fires raged both in Butte County and in Southern California.
The dead were found in burned-out cars, in the smoldering ruins of their homes, or next to their vehicles, apparently overcome by smoke and flames before they could jump in 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.
Hundreds of people were unaccounted for by the sheriff’s reckoning, four days after the fire swept over the town of 27,000 and practically wiped it off the map with flames so fierce that authorities brought in a mobile DNA lab and forensic anthropologists to help identify the dead.
Meanwhile, a landowner near where the blaze began, Betsy Ann Cowley, said she got an email from Pacific Gas & Electric Co. the day before the fire last week telling her that crews needed to come onto her 64-acre property in the town of Pulga because the utility’s power lines were causing sparks. PG&E had no comment on the email, and state officials said the cause of the inferno was under investigation.
As the search for victims dragged on, friends and relatives of the missing called hospitals, police, shelters and the coroner’s office in hopes of learning what became of loved ones.
Paradise was a popular retirement community, and about a quarter of the population was over 65.
Tad Teays awaited word on his 90-year-old dementia-stricken mother. Darlina Duarte was desperate for information about her half brother, a diabetic who was largely housebound because he had lost his legs.
And Barbara Hall tried in vain to find out whether her aunt and the woman’s husband, who are in their 80s and 90s, made it out alive from their retirement community.
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.
About 57,000 structures are still threatened, fire officials told the Los Angeles Times.
Some of the thousands of people forced from their homes by the blaze were allowed to return, but at least 200,000 remain evacuated. Authorities have reopened U.S. 101, a major freeway 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.
All told, more than 8,000 firefighters statewide were battling wildfires that scorched more than 325 square miles, the flames feeding on dry brush and driven by blowtorch winds.
In Northern California, fire crews still fighting the blaze that obliterated Paradise contended with wind gusts up to 40 mph overnight, the flames jumping 300 feet across Lake Oroville. The fire had grown to 177 square miles and was 25 percent contained, authorities said.
Greg Woodcox, who led a caravan of vehicles that was overcome by flames, said he heard screams and watched a friend die as the heat blew out the vehicle's windows. Four other people also died.
The 58-year-old told the San Francisco Chronicle he was in a Jeep ahead of the other vehicles and ran when the flames overtook them. He followed a fox down a steep embankment and survived by submerging himself in a stream for nearly an hour.