Troops join search for bodies
CALIFORNIA: GRIM TASK TO GO THROUGH GHOSTLY LANDSCAPE OF DESTROYED PARADISE
US fire crews carve containment lines around more than a third of killer blazes.
National Guard troops arrived yesterday to help search for more victims in the charred, ash-strewn ruins where the northern California town of Paradise stood before it was erased in the deadliest, most destructive wildfire in state history.
The contingent, about 100 military police trained to look for and identify human remains, will reinforce the coroner-led recovery teams, cadaver dogs and forensic anthropologists already scouring the ghostly landscape of a fire that has killed at least 48 people.
The grim, painstaking search is concentrated in what little is left of Paradise, a Sierra foothills town in Butte County, California, north of San Francisco, that was overrun by flames and largely incinerated last Thursday.
The killer blaze, fuelled by thick, drought-desiccated scrub and fanned by fierce winds, capped a catastrophic California wildfire season that experts attribute to prolonged dry spells.
The Butte County disaster coincided with a flurry of blazes in Southern California, most notably the Woolsey Fire, which has killed two people, destroyed over 400 structures and displaced about 200 000 people in the mountains and foothills near the Malibu coast west of Los Angeles.
The origins of both the Camp and Woolsey fires were listed as under investigation. But two utility companies, Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric, reported to regulators they experienced problems with transmission lines or substations in areas around the time the blazes were reported to have started.
By Tuesday, with the help of diminished winds and rising humidity levels, fire crews had managed to carve containment lines around more than a third of both fires, easing further the immediate threat to life and property.
US Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and California Governor Jerry Brown yesterday visited the areas, which President Donald Trump declared disaster areas, making federal emergency assistance more readily available.
After touring some of California’s earlier wildfire zones in August, Zinke blamed “gross mismanagement of forests” because of timber harvest restrictions that he said were supported by “environmental terrorist groups”.
County Sheriff Kory Honea said he requested the Guard troops, along with “disaster mortuary” crew, portable military morgue teams and specialists from a private DNA laboratory to speed the detection and identification of additional remains. –Reuters