California wildfire toll hits 44; more expected
PARADISE, Calif. — At least 44 people were confirmed dead Monday in California wildfires, including 42 in the Northern California fire, making it the deadliest in recorded state history.
The search for bodies continued Monday. Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said more than 200 people in and around the Northern California town of Paradise were unaccounted for, four days after the fire all but wiped it off the map. The town of 27,000 people is quarantined, without power and has no operational businesses.
Honea hoped the missing people are in shelters, though he warned that the death toll is likely to climb — and that the practical challenge is finding their remains.
“I’ll tell you, it’s very, very hard,” he said Sunday, according to the Chico Enterprise-Record. “One of the things that I saw when I was up there is that there is so much debris in some of these areas that it’s very dif-
ficult to determine whether or not there might be human remains there.”
The sheriff, who is also the county coroner, said the temperatures might have been high enough to incinerate the victims.
“In some cases the fire burned so intensely that it burned everything to the ground, and in some cases it melted the metal,” he said.
Authorities brought in a mobile DNA lab and forensic anthropologists to help identify the dead. The area is still too hot for body-sniffing dogs.
By Monday morning, officials said the fire had ravaged more than 176 square miles — an area roughly the size of Little Rock and North Little Rock combined — with just 25 percent containment. Officials said it is not expected to be fully contained until Nov. 30.
On Monday, 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 property 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.
Until Monday, the deadliest fire in on record in California was a 1933 blaze in Griffith Park in Los Angeles that killed 29 people. A series of wildfires in Northern California’s wine country last fall also killed 44 people and destroyed more than 5,000 homes.
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 their loved ones. Paradise was a popular retirement community, and about a quarter of the population was over 65.
Sol Bechtold, from the San Francisco Bay area, said he grabbed the phone Thursday and called his 75-year-old mother, Joanne Caddy, who lives near Paradise in Magalia. But, he said, the phone lines were down, and she can no longer drive.
“She’s been there for 52 years of my life and I felt like I could do nothing,” he said in a phone interview Monday with The Washington Post. “I felt absolutely helpless.”
The sheriff’s office told Bechtold on Saturday afternoon that Caddy’s home had been destroyed. On Sunday, Bechtold and his wife visited about 15 different shelters to see whether his mother might have made it there. Nobody recognized her.
“Given that she’s homebound, the worst goes through your mind,” he said. “But I couldn’t believe that was the end. You have to believe that she got out and ran and someone picked her up.”
He hopes his mother is safe in someone’s cabin or at a local church.
“You make up all these stories about the possibility that she’s still out there to keep the hope that she’s alive,” he said. “I can’t give up. I won’t give up.”
Megan James of Newfoundland, Canada, searched via Twitter from the other side of the continent for information about her aunt and uncle, whose house in Paradise burned down and whose vehicles were still there. On Monday, she asked on Twitter for someone to take over the posts, saying she is “so emotionally and mentally exhausted.”
“I need to sleep and cry,” James added. “Just PRAY. Please.”
WOOLSEY FIRE
The two other confirmed fatalities in the outbreak of wildfires were at the other end of the state in celebrity-studded Malibu, where firefighters appeared to be gaining ground against a blaze that destroyed at least 435 structures, most of them homes.
The two fatalities were a pair of adults found last week in a car overtaken by flames.
Over 200,000 people in Southern California were still under evacuation orders, even as some residents were allowed to return home in the inland communities of Agoura Hills, Westlake Village and Newbury Park. Authorities reopened U.S. 101, a major freeway through the fire zone in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
The main Southern California blaze was roughly 143 square miles. More than 325 square miles have now been scorched statewide, and more than 8,000 firefighters are battling the blazes.
Malibu celebrities and mobile-home dwellers in nearby mountains were slowly learning whether their homes had been spared or reduced to ash.
It is likely that crews assessing damage from the fires that broke out last week west of downtown Los Angeles will discover hundreds more homes lost in the canyons and steep hillsides in inland and coastal areas, Los Angeles County Fire Chief Daryl Osby said.
Osby emphasized that about 57,000 homes have been saved from the so-called Woolsey fire, which burned a path about 20 miles long and 14 miles wide — from northwest of Los Angeles through suburbs and the Santa Monica Mountains to the Malibu coast.
New fires erupted in the rugged Rocky Peak area along California 118 near Simi Valley and in suburban Thousand Oaks, where residents had been evacuated last week from a different fire the day after a gunman killed 12 people at a country music bar in the city.
Firefighters and water-dropping aircraft quickly corralled the flames, but fire officials said the new outbreaks showed critical fire weather was continuing and the public should be alert.
“These are extreme conditions,” Osby said. “If there is a fire in your neighborhood, do not wait for an evacuation order — leave.”
Containment of the Woolsey fire was estimated at 30 percent. Despite the wind, there were no big flare-ups, and blue sky replaced the giant smoke plumes of previous days.
The cause of the fire remained under investigation, and Osby said nothing had been ruled out.
DISASTER RELIEF
The top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee said Monday that Democrats will push for $720 million for wildfire relief.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said Congress will also need to provide additional disaster relief money for ongoing hurricane recovery in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico and elsewhere.
Congress is reconvening this week for a post-election lame-duck session. First on the agenda is completing mustpass spending bills to keep the government operating ahead of a Dec. 7 deadline. The wildfire money would likely be attached to the spending legislation.
President Donald Trump said he has approved an “expedited” major disaster declaration for California, tweeting Monday night that he “wanted to respond quickly in order to alleviate some of the incredible suffering going on.”
Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown had requested the declaration, which would make
victims eligible for crisis counseling, housing and unemployment help, and legal aid.
But Leahy said Democrats would push for congressional action on disasters beyond the California wildfires.
“What I would not agree to is have one face off against another,” Leahy said. “The United States has disasters, we have to come together and face them in the same way we would with a military threat or anything else.”
He said the total sum in question was not clear, but “it will be significant” and that Democratic and Republican staff members were working to determine the amounts needed.
“We’re going to press for it in the final bill. Withholding funds is not the solution, and we will fight for it,” Leahy said.
Leahy was asked about Trump’s desire to stop sending disaster aid to Puerto Rico for 2017’s Hurricane Maria, which was first reported by Axios and confirmed to The Washington Post on Monday by a person familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose confidential deliberations.
“Puerto Rico’s part of the United States. … That means more than throwing paper towels,” Leahy said, referring to Trump’s post-hurricane visit to Puerto Rico when he tossed paper towels into the crowd.
FEMA still has some $25 billion in its Disaster Relief Fund, so the government has capacity to respond even without immediate congressional action.
The push for disaster aid comes after Trump threatened on Twitter to cut off federal dollars to California unless the state remedies what he called “gross mismanagement” of the state’s forests. Leahy said it was a mistake to threaten to pull government support of firefighters risking their lives.
“That’s why you can’t do complex government by tweet,” Leahy said.
Information for this article was contributed by Gillian Flaccus, Don Thompson, Christopher Weber, Brian Melley, Janie Har, Daisy Nguyen, Paul Elias, Martha Mendoza, John Antczak and Andrew Selsky of The Associated Press; and by Lindsey Bever, Joel Achenbach, Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Erica Werner of The Washington Post.