The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Death toll rises to 25 in California wildfires
Officials bring in DNA lab to ID remains in the destroyed city of Paradise, while celebrities flee the flames ravaging Malibu.
With PARADISE, CALIF. — hearses standing by, crews stepped up the search for bodies in the smoking ruins of Paradise, and relatives desperately tried to find more than 100 missing loved ones, as wind-whipped wildfires raged Sunday on both ends of the state.
The statewide death toll stood at 25 and appeared certain to rise.
At least five search teams were working in Paradise — a town of 27,000 that was largely incinerated Thursday — and surrounding Northern California communi- ties. Authorities called in a mobile DNA lab and anthropologists to help identify vic- tims of the most destructive wildfire in California history. By early afternoon, one of the two black hearses stationed in Paradise had picked up another set of remains.
The search also went on for the missing.
“I still haven’t heard anything,” said Laurie Teague, who was looking for her 80- year-old step father, Herb Alderman. She and her brother called shel- ters, hospitals, the sheriff ’s department and the coroner’s office.
“He has friends in that area,” Teague said. “I’m hop- ing one of them grabbed him and took him to shelter.”
Officials and relatives held out hope that many of those unaccounted for were safe and simply had no cellphones or other ways to contact loved ones.
Sol Bechtold drove from shelter to shelter looking for his mother, Joanne Caddy, a 75-year-old widow whose house burned down along with the rest of her neighbor- hood in Magalia, just north of Paradise. She lived alone and did not drive.
Bechtold posted a flyer on social media, pinned it to bulletin boards at shelters and showed her pic- ture around to evacuees. He ran across a few of Caddy’s neighbors, but they hadn’t seen her.
More than 8,000 firefighters in all battled three large wildfires burning across nearly 400 square miles in Northern and Southern California.
The worst of the blazes was in Northern California, where the number of people killed in that fire alone, at least 23, made it the third-deadliest on record in the state.
Two people were also found dead in a wildfire in Southern California, where flames tore through Malibu mansions and working-class Los Angeles suburbs alike.
The severely burned bod- ies were discovered in a long residential driveway in celeb- rity-studded Malibu, where residents forced from their homes included Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian West, and Guillermo del Toro.
Flames also besieged Thousand Oaks, the Southern California city in mourn- ing over the massacre of 12 people in a shooting rampage at a bar Wednesday night.