Miraculously, one mobile home remained standing after the rest of the community was destroyed by the Camp Fire. Photo / Getty Images
Miraculously, one mobile home remained standing after the rest of the community was destroyed by the Camp Fire. Photo / Getty Images
Horrifying before and after aerial photos have revealed the devastation in a California town as the wildfire death toll rises to 63, 631 are reported missing and the smoke is so strong, it's blocking out the sun.
Aerial photos show the Paradise Mobile Estates that once housed hundreds of displaced residents in the area.
The search for victims of a catastrophic blaze that reduced a northern California town to ashes intensified on Thursday and authorities said the list of those reported missing had expanded, reports Daily Mail.
At least 63 people have been confirmed dead so far in the Camp Fire, which erupted a week ago in the drought-parched Sierra foothills 175 miles north of San Francisco.
Anna Dise, a resident of Butte Creek Canyon west of Paradise, told KRCR TV her father, Gordon Dise, 66, died when he ran back inside to gather belongings and their house collapsed on him.
Miss Dise, 25, said she had been waiting for her father in their car with their pet dogs, but when she saw the house collapse and she tried to drive off, the tires had already melted.
To survive, Miss Dise hid overnight in a neighbor's pond with her dogs. "It was so fast," Dise recounted of the fire. "I didn't expect it to move so fast."
Meanwhile, a man was shot and killed after a high-speed chase with a police officer in one of the evacuation zones of the Camp Fire.
The Butte County Sheriff's Office said in a statement Thursday that the shooting happened at about 11am on Thursday.
Local stations reported that the shooting happened in an area near the town of Concow, which is in the zone where more than 50,000 people evacuated.
The sheriff's office says the shooting is under investigation but no other details were provided.
The Camp Fire now ranks as one of the most lethal single US wildfires since the turn of the last century.
Smoke from the fire is so thick that "it prevents the sunlight from reaching the surface", Hannah Chandler-Cooley, a National Weather Service meteorologist, told Bloomberg. 'It prevents surface heating,' she added.
The smoke has lowered surface temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the US National Weather Service.
Authorities attributed the high death toll in part to the staggering speed with which the wind-driven flames, fueled by desiccated scrub and trees, raced through Paradise, a town of 27,000 residents.
Nearly 9,800 homes and other buildings, including most of the town, were incinerated last Thursday night, hours after the blaze erupted, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).
What was left was a ghostly, smoky expanse of empty lots covered in ash and strewn with twisted wreckage and debris.
Thousands of additional structures were still threatened by the blaze, and as many as 50,000 people remained under evacuation orders.
Smoke hangs over the scorched remains of Old Town Plaza following the wildfire in Paradise. Photo / AP
An army of firefighters, many from distant states, labored to contain and suppress the flames.
The revised official roster of 630 individuals whose whereabouts and fate remained unknown is more than double the 297 listed earlier in the day by the Butte County Sheriff's Office.
Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said the list of missing would continue to fluctuate as more names are added and others are removed, either because they turn up safe or come to be identified among the dead.
In the aftermath of the disaster, survivors said authorities need to devise a plan to reach residents who can't get a cellphone signal in the hilly terrain or don't have cellphones at all.
In his defense, Honea said evacuation orders were issued through 5,227 emails, 25,643 phone calls and 5,445 texts, in addition to social media and the use of loudspeakers.
As cellphone service went down, authorities went into neighborhoods with bullhorns to tell people to leave, and that saved some lives.
Honea said he was too busy with the emergency and the recovery of human remains to analyze how the evacuation went.
But he said it was a big, chaotic, fast-moving situation, and there weren't enough law enforcement officers to go out and warn everyone.
"The fact that we have thousands and thousands of people in shelters would clearly indicate that we were able to notify a significant number of people," the sheriff said.
Officials also were scrambling to pinpoint everyone's whereabouts, and Honea said the high number of missing people probably included some who fled the blaze and didn't realize they had been reported missing.
He added that authorities were making the list public so people could see if they were on it and let authorities know they were safe.
The Paradise fire once again underscored shortcomings in warning systems.
Gov Jerry Brown signed a bill in September requiring the development of statewide guidelines for Amber Alert-like warnings.
A few Northern California communities are moving to install sirens after some wine country residents complained they didn't receive warnings to evacuate ahead of a deadly wildfire in October 2017 that destroyed 5,300 homes.
In 2008, the pair of wildfires that menaced Paradise destroyed 130 homes. No one was seriously hurt, but the chaos highlighted the need for a plan.
Paradise sits on a ridge between two higher hills, with only one main exit out of town. The best solution seemed to be to order evacuations in phases, so people didn't get trapped.
"Gridlock is always the biggest concern," said William Stewart, a forestry professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Authorities developed an evacuation plan that split the town of 27,000 into zones and called for a staggered exodus. Paradise even conducted a mock evacuation during a morning commute, turning the main thoroughfare into a one-way street out of town.
Last week, when the wind-whipped fire bore down on the town, the sheriff's department attempted an orderly, phased evacuation, instead of blasting a cellphone alert over an entire area.
Phil John, chairman of the Paradise Ridge Fire Safe Council, defended the evacuation plan he helped develop. John said that the wildfire this time was exceptionally fast-moving and hot, and that no plan was going to work perfectly.
When the fire reached the eastern edge of Paradise, six zones were ordered to clear out about 8am. But almost simultaneously, the gusting winds were carrying embers the size of dinner plates across town, and structures were catching fire throughout the city.
Less than an hour later, the entire town was ordered evacuated.
"It didn't work perfectly," John said Thursday. "But no one could plan for a fire like that."
Likewise, Stewart, the forestry professor, said the wildfire that hit Paradise disrupted the orderly evacuation plan because it "was moving too fast. All hell broke loose."
Satellite images show half the town on fire less than two hours after the first evacuation order.
Stewart said experts continue to debate how best to issue evacuation orders and no ideal solution has been found.
Some evacuees were staying in tents and cars at a Walmart parking lot and in a nearby field in Chico, though volunteers planning to close the makeshift shelter by Sunday were working to transition people to other locations.
A Sheriff deputy is seen at a home burned in the Camp Fire. Photo / AP
A Sunday closure "gives us enough time to maybe figure something out," said Mike Robertson, an evacuee who arrived there on Monday with his wife and two daughters.
On Thursday, firefighters reported progress in battling the nearly 220-square-mile blaze. It was 40 per cent contained, fire officials said. Crews slowed the flames' advance on populated areas.
California Army National Guard members, wearing white jump suits, looked for human remains in the burned rubble, among more than 450 rescue workers assigned to the task.
President Donald Trump plans to travel to California on Saturday to visit victims of the wildfires burning at both ends of the state.
Trump is unpopular in much of Democratic-leaning California but not in Butte County, which he carried by 4 percentage points over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
On Thursday, San Francisco's iconic open-air cable cars were pulled off the streets because of choking air wafting in from the Camp Fire.
The city's transportation agency said that because of the poor air quality, "all cable cars will be pulling back into the cable car barn".
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency made the announcement on Twitter, saying buses would provide service for the remainder of the day.
Schools in San Francisco, Sacramento, Oakland and elsewhere have announced they will be closed Friday because of the poor air quality.
An Environmental Protection Agency website says the air quality in Sacramento is "hazardous" and San Francisco's is "very unhealthy". Many people walking around the cities wore face masks.
The University of Southern California and UCLA are canceling their usual bonfires before Saturday's football game at the Pasadena Rose Bowl out of respect for those who lost homes and lives in the wildfires.
Pacific Gas & Electric Co, which is facing severe financial pressure amid speculation that its equipment may have sparked the deadly Camp Fire, asked US energy regulators for permission to raise its customers' monthly bills last month.
PG&E told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in October that it wanted the increase to harden its system against wildfires and deliver a sizable increase in profits to shareholders.
The company says it faces a higher wildfire risk than other utilities and would have trouble attracting investors without a higher profit.
The San Francisco-based utility made the request a month before the Camp Fire broke out on November 8.
No cause has been determined, but PG&E reported an outage around when and where the fire ignited.
The company's stock price continued to get pummeled on Wall Street amid concerns about potential losses related to the fire.
The stock, which was on course Thursday for a six-day losing streak, was the biggest decliner in the S&P 500 index. It was down 29.5 per cent to $18.04 in afternoon trading.
Investors are concerned over whether the power company can weather potential losses related to the blaze that devastated the town of Paradise.
PG&E is facing a lawsuit claiming it is responsible for the blaze. The company's stock price has plunged 60 per cent since then, wiping out $15billion of its market value.
Another utility, Edison International, is down about 30 per cent in the same period as a separate wildfires burns in Southern California.
In Southern California, the Woolsey Fire has charred more than 83 per cent of National Park Service land within the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, where officials announced Wednesday that all trails were closed.
Three people have been found dead in fire zone, which spans 153 square miles.
Firefighters have made steady progress this week, getting 57 per cent contained, but warned many hotspots remain.
A firefighter puts out burning embers at the Malibu RV Park along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. Photo / Getty Images
A massive burn scar encompasses more than 30 square miles within the recreation area that stretches from beaches to inland mountains straddling Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
It's the largest urban national park in the nation, with more than 30 million visitors every year. The park is also home to 13 mountain lions tracked by biologists via GPS collars.
Park officials said two of the big cats were unaccounted for. Four monitored bobcats also were believed to have survived, but their habitats were burned, the park service said.
The Woolsey Fire also destroyed Paramount Ranch's Western Town, a landmark film location dating to 1927 that included a jail, hotel and saloon. The TV shows Westworld, The Mentalist and Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman were among the productions that shot there.
Officials took the loss of the film location especially hard, because it was a unique feature among all the national parks.
"It's so special to share the story of moviemaking that came out of Southern California," recreation area spokeswoman Kate Kuykendall said. "We're the only National Park Service site that interprets American film history."
There's been an outpouring of public support for rebuilding the site, she said, adding that at least three homes of park employees were gutted.
The fire also destroyed much of nearby Peter Strauss Ranch, which hosted performances by Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson in the 1950s and more recently was a wedding destination.
US Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has warned that mudslides are a risk in the vast area charred by the week-old wildfire.
Zinke says federal officials will work with state and local authorities to try to reduce the risk.
He spoke while touring the burn zone of the Woolsey Fire that prompted the evacuations of more than 200,000 people, including the entire seaside community of Malibu.
Zinke appeared with Gov Brown, who said he was told by Trump that the state will get federal support to handle costs associated with the fire.
He also said officials will play close attention to toxic sites that burned to make sure hazardous materials don't get into the watershed.
California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection chief Ken Pimlott said the heavy winds that fanned the fires throughout the week were easing but that extremely dry conditions are persisting.
In addition to federal support, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is giving $300,000 to help the victims of California's deadly wildfires.
The organization best known for creating and organizing the Golden Globe Awards on Thursday announced the donation to four organizations that also include money for victims and families of last week's mass shooting in Southern California.
The funds will go to the victims of the fires in Northern and Southern California.
