Around half a million people in Oregon have been put under evacuation alerts, with residents of its largest city told to be ready to leave, as wildfires that have taken 24 lives since erupting in August tore through three US West Coast states.
About 100 wildfires have engulfed an area nearly as large as the state of New Jersey, belching out smoke that poses a health threat and giving California, Oregon and Washington some of the worst air quality levels anywhere around the globe.
In hard-hit Oregon, search teams on Friday entered areas where fires burned through small communities, the head of the state’s office of emergency management said, adding that authorities were prepared for possible “mass casualty incidents".
Molalla, a community about 40 km south of downtown Portland, was an ash-covered ghost town after its more than 9,000 residents were told to evacuate, with only 30 refusing to leave, the city’s fire department said.
Kari Zeitler of the North Valley Disaster Group and Butte County Animal Control officer Linda Newman bridle up two donkeys that displaced by the Bear fire. Source: AAP
The logging town was on the front line of a vast evacuation zone stretching north to within 4.8 km of downtown Portland, with Clackamas County police setting a 0500 on Saturday curfew to deter “possible increased criminal activity".
State Governor Kate Brown told a press conference that 40,000 people were under mandatory evacuation alerts.
Some 500,000 residents were under evacuation advisories of either red 'GO!' warnings to leave homes immediately, yellow 'BE SET' warnings to leave at a moment’s notice, or green 'BE READY' alerts, she said.
A drop in winds, higher moisture levels and forecast rain were expected to help firefighters going into the weekend in towns like Molalla, at the mercy of wind strength and direction after two of Oregon’s largest wildfires merged into one.
“The weather is going to be favourable for us,” said Doug Grafe, chief of fire protection for the Oregon Department of Forestry.
In southern Oregon, a dystopian scene of burned residential subdivisions and trailer parks stretched for miles along Highway 99 south of Medford through Phoenix and Talent, one of the most devastated areas, according to a Reuters photographer at the scene.
Blazes jumped from wildfires burning through scrub and forest, exploding into suburban firestorms as flames leaped from house to house.
Mr Grafe said he would need twice the 3,000 personnel he currently had to get a grip on around three dozen major blazes.
In neighboring Washington state to the north, online video from the Tacoma area showed fires starting in a residential area and setting homes ablaze. People were seen running from house to house to warn neighbours.
“Everybody out, everybody out!” a man screamed as firefighters tried to douse flames.
The death toll from the siege of West Coast fires that began in August jumped to 24 after seven people were reported killed in a fire burning in mountains north of Sacramento, California.
Flames consume a home and car as the Bear Fire burns through the Berry Creek area of Butte County, California on Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2020. Source: FR34727 AP
Over 3,900 homes and others structures have burned in California alone, state fire authority Cal Fire reported.
Ms Brown said there were dozens of people reported missing in the fires in Oregon’s Jackson, Marion and Lane counties.
Over 68,000 people were under evacuation orders in California where the largest fire in state history has burned over 299,470 hectares in the Mendocino National Forest around 190 km northwest of Sacramento.
“We had four hours to pack up our pets and a few medications and things like that,” said retiree John Maylone from an evacuation center in Fresno, California, after he was forced to leave three of his 30 cats as he fled the massive Creek Fire.
Paradise, a town blasted by California’s deadliest wildfire in 2018, had the world’s worst air quality index reading at 592, according to the PurpleAir monitoring site, as two of the state’s largest blazes burned on either side of it.
This photo taken from the home of Russ Casler in Salem, Oregon shows the smoke-darkened sky well before sunset at around 5 pm, Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2020 Source: Russ Casler/AP
Police opened an arson investigation into the fire that destroyed much of Phoenix and Talent in Oregon. But at least four Oregon police departments warned of “fake” online messages appearing to be from law enforcement that blamed left-wing anti-fascists and right-wing Proud Boy activists for starting the fires.
Over 100 years of fire suppression by state and federal authorities has created a huge buildup of dead trees and undergrowth to fuel the fires that have long burned naturally in the West’s forests.
In recent decades, Americans have built houses in those forests as second homes orafter being pushed out of metropolitan areas like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle by rising prices.
Scientists say climate change has contributed to greater extremes in wet and dry seasons, causing vegetation to flourish then dry out, leaving more abundant, volatile fuel for fires.
“We are feeling the acute impacts of climate change,” Ms Brown told a Thursday news conference.
