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Friday April 26, 2024

15 die, 500,000 evacuated in unprecedented US bushfires

By AFP
September 12, 2020

CLOVIS, United States: Firefighters were battling unprecedented wildfires up and down the US West Coast on Friday that killed 15 people and forced more than half a million others to flee their homes, with officials warning of more deaths to come in the days ahead.

The true scale of destruction was impossible to count across wide stretches of California, Oregon and Washington cut off from the world by an apocalyptic wall of flames, fuelled by record heatwaves and intense, dry winds.

The August Complex Fire became the biggest recorded blaze in Californian history on Thursday, after multiple fires in the state’s northwest combined under high temperatures and winds to rip through 746,000 acres of dry vegetation.

More than 2.6 million acres have been burned across the whole state so far, a Cal Fire spokesman said on Thursday evening. Half a million people have been evacuated in neighbouring Oregon, where the government said firefighters were “prioritising life (and) safety as they battle a record 900,000 acres of wildfires.”

Governor Kate Brown said that the amount of land incinerated by fires in just the last 72 hours was twice the state’s annual average, and that at least five towns had been “substantially destroyed.”

Huge wildfires are becoming more common, with the World Meteorological Organisation saying the five years to 2019 was “unprecedented” for fires, especially in Europe and North America.Climate change amplifies droughts which dry out regions, creating ideal conditions for wildfires to spread out-of-control and inflict unprecedented material and environmental damage.

Local Oregon officials confirmed two deaths in the Santiam Canyon region south of Portland, and a third in the Ashland area, near the California border.Police went door to door to make sure that residents were evacuating the city of Molalla, marking their driveways with spray paint to show they had left.

Police said the death toll had jumped to 10 in northern California’s Butte County on Thursday.One unidentified person was killed in far northern California, near the remote rural community of Happy Camp, a Cal Fire spokeswoman told AFP. Polluted air meant schools and daycare centers were no longer letting children play outside, while seniors were encouraged to stay inside.

But the strong, dry winds of the past days eased off across much of the state, with severe weather warnings lifted for most of California.Humidity is expected to rise as temperatures cool through to next week, providing some relief, Cal Fire said.

Evacuation warnings were expanded to parts of the town of Paradise, the site of California’s deadliest modern fire, which killed 86 people less than two years ago.Governor Gavin Newsom blamed the ferocity of this year’s fires on climate change.