Rain helps halt fires but hinders the search for victims’ remains
PARADISE, Calif. — Rain is helping to extinguish a deadly wildfire in Northern California’s Gold Rush country, but the moisture is also turning ash into thick paste and hindering the hunt for fragments of bone that could indicate a body.
Searchers resumed their grim task Friday afternoon after a downpour eased up in Paradise, California. They fanned out across the ruins of a mobile home park, some combing debris with rakes while others lifted up twisted metal to peer underneath.
Craig Covey, who leads a search team from Southern California, said they were searching a mobile home park for seniors for the second time because there are people still missing whose last known address was in that neighborhood. A victim of the Woosley fire in Calabasas, Calif., Sheryl Evans, 45, lost all of her possessions in the home she had been renting for six years. She has returned several times to the home to sift through the ashes in hopes of finding important items.
The searchers, many in yellow rain slickers and hard hats to protect against falling branches, looked for clues that may indicate someone couldn’t get out, such as a car in the driveway or a wheelchair ramp. They’re looking not only for bone, but anything that resembles cremated ashes.
The nation’s deadliest wildfire in the past century has killed at
least 84 people, and more than 560 are still unaccounted for. Despite the inclement weather, more than 800 volunteers searched for remains on Thanksgiving and again Friday, two weeks after flames swept through the Sierra Nevada foothills, authorities said.
Covey’s team of about 30 had been working for several hours Friday morning before
stopping and returning to a staging area with hot coffee and food under two blue tents. An electric heater provided warmth.
While the rain is making everybody colder and wetter, they’re keeping the mission in mind, search volunteer Chris Stevens said, standing under an awning as the team waited out a stretch of heavy rain.