15 killed, 500,000 evacuated as western US burns out of control

FRESNO, United States: Crews battled sprawling wildfires up and down the US West Coast on Friday in a wave of infernos that have killed 15 people and forced more than half a million others to flee their homes.

The true scale of destruction was hard to gauge across wide stretches of California, Oregon and Washington that were cut off by flames fueled by record heat 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 late Thursday. And the state has not yet hit the peak of the fire season.

Half a million people have been evacuated in neighboring Oregon to the north, where the government said firefighters were "prioritizing life (and) safety as they battle a record 900,000 acres of wildfires." Governor Kate Brown said the area incinerated in just the last 72 hours was twice the state’s annual average, and that at least five towns had been "substantially destroyed."

"We have never seen this amount of uncontained fire across our state," she told a press conference. 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. 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. "It’s one thing to leave your house, it’s another thing being told that you have to leave," said Denise Pentz, a resident of the town for 11 years, who was loading her family belongings into a camping trailer. Among those killed was a one-year-old boy who perished while his parents suffered severe burns as they attempted to flee an inferno 130 miles east of Seattle.