PORTLAND (Oregon) • Thousands of evacuees displaced by deadly wildfires in Oregon settled into a second week of life in shelters and car camping as fire crews battled on, while search teams scoured the ruins of incinerated homes for the missing.
With state resources stretched to their limit, President Donald Trump on Tuesday approved a request from Oregon's governor for a federal disaster declaration, bolstering US government assistance for emergency response and relief efforts.
Dozens of fires have charred some 1.8 million hectares of tinder-dry brush, grass and woodlands in Oregon, California and Washington state since August, ravaging several small towns, destroying thousands of homes and killing at least 34 people.
Eight deaths have been confirmed during the past week in Oregon, which became the latest and most concentrated hot spot in a larger summer outbreak of fires across the entire western United States. The Pacific North-west was hardest hit.
The conflagrations, which officials and scientists have described as unprecedented in scope and ferocity, have filled the region's skies with smoke and soot, compounding a public health crisis already posed by the coronavirus pandemic.
Satellite images showed high-altitude plumes of smoke from the fires drifting as far east as New York City and Washington DC, carried aloft by the jet stream.
The fires roared to life in California in mid-August, and erupted across Oregon and Washington around Labour Day last week, many of them sparked by catastrophic lightning storms and stoked by record-breaking heat waves and bouts of howling winds.
Weather conditions improved early this week, enabling firefighters to begin to make headway in efforts to contain and tamp down the blazes.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CalFire) said 16,600 firefighters were still battling 25 major fires on Tuesday, after achieving full containment around the perimeter of other large blazes. Firefighters in the San Gabriel Mountains just north of Los Angeles waged an all-out campaign to save the famed Mount Wilson Observatory and an adjacent complex of broadcast transmission towers from flames that crept to within 150m of the site.
At least 25 people have perished in California's wildfires in the past four weeks, while more than 4,200 homes and other buildings have gone up in smoke, CalFire reported.
Nearly 1.2 million ha in California alone have been ravaged by fires - more than in any single year in its history - and five of the 20 largest wildfires on record in the state have occurred during that time frame.
One wildfire fatality has been confirmed in Washington state, where some 400 structures have been lost.
Roughly 400,000 ha have been blackened in Oregon, double the state's annual average over the past decade. At the height of the crisis there, some 500,000 residents - or at least 10 per cent of the state's population - were under some form of evacuation alert, many forced to flee their homes as swiftly advancing flames closed in on their neighbourhoods.
More than 1,700 structures, most of them dwellings, have been incinerated. At last count, some 16 people reported missing remained unaccounted for in Oregon, emergency management officials said.
Last week, the authorities said they were bracing themselves for possible mass casualties as search teams began combing wreckage of destroyed homes.
In the fire-stricken south-western Oregon town of Phoenix, uprooted families, many with young children, were sleeping in their cars, huddling at a civic centre or in churches, city council member Sarah Westover said. Ms Westover said her community was in grief, while fearing that a flare-up might force them to flee again.
Her house in Phoenix was spared, but others nearby were levelled. "It's much more difficult to follow the Covid restrictions given the environment," Ms Westover said.
REUTERS
