Dozens die in California fires
College professor Jeff McClenahan hiked up a winding road towards a terrible unknown, expecting the worst.
The ferocious Woolsey Fire had come through after leaping a motorway. McClenahan had grabbed his wife’s computer and some documents and evacuated.
That night, someone had posted a photo on social media of a nearby house consumed by the flames.
He had stayed awake all night, thinking: “I’ll never wear that cowboy hat again. I’ll never wear that sweater again.” But fires can be capricious. Maybe he still had his home?
He arrived, and stared. A house that has succumbed to a wildfire is rarely just a little bit destroyed.
The damage almost always looks as if the structure had been not merely been burned, but also bombed. A water pipe spurted halfheartedly over the ruins.
“On the one hand . . . it’s stuff,” McClenahan said, struggling to maintain his composure.
“But it’s a lot of history. Everything, our whole lives were in here. Oh, you get to start over,” he said. Then he crumbled to his knees and sobbed.
The wildfires scorching California in the past few days have been vast, bringing their destruction and lethality to numerous communities across large swaths of the state, including this one in Los Angeles County and another gigantic burn along the northern mountains.
The Camp Fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills north of Sacramento, is now the mostdestructive individual wildfire in California’s history.
As of yesterday, it already had destroyed nearly 7000 structures in and around the mountain town of Paradise and has been blamed for 25 deaths, though more could come. Sheriff’s deputies are looking into 35 reports of missing people.
“This event was the worst-case scenario,” Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said. “It’s the event that we have feared for a long time.”
The smoke, like orange fog, that enveloped Chico and surrounding towns gave way to a low-lying haze. In southern California, investigators said two bodies were found, deaths that might be linked to the wildfire. Winds eased yesterday, but they are expected to ramp up again today.
The weather that is conducive to fires — dry air, not a drop of rain, high winds — is forecast to continue until Wednesday. About 200,000 people were forced to evacuate from the Woolsey Fire.
Hollywood stars fled as wildfires raged through the celebrity enclave of Malibu, burning mansions.
The area is home to 13,000 wealthy residents.
Charlie Sheen, the actor, launched an appeal to find his father Martin Sheen, who could not be contacted. Martin Sheen later turned up at a beach evacuation spot.
Lady Gaga was evacuated and photographs showed smoke around her home. Will Smith posted videos of the fire approaching his home and said he was evacuating his family.
‘It’s the event that we have feared for a long time,’ county sheriff says of the disaster