Troops search for 130 missing in California forest fire, death toll rises to 56

PARADISE, Calif. (Reuters) – US National Guard troops searched the ruins of the city of Paradise Thursday in search of any missing sign of 130 people in California's deadliest fire, the deadliest ever recorded , according to the authorities.

The flame of the "campfire" destroyed last Thursday the city of Paradise, located at the foot of the Sierra, which once housed 27,000 inhabitants. Most of the missing people in and around the city, about 280 km north of San Francisco, are over 65 years old.

The fire's surface had reached 135,000 acres (55,000 hectares) on Wednesday night, even as declining winds and increased humidity were helping firefighters to straighten the containment lines around more than a third of the perimeter.

Nevertheless, the ghostly expanse of empty, ash-laden ground and wreckage and debris strongly impressed Governor Jerry Brown, US Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, and other officials who visited the area. devastation Wednesday.

"This is one of the worst disasters I've seen in my career, hands down," Brock Long, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told reporters in Chico.

"It looks like a war zone. It's a war zone, "Brown said.

No score

After visiting some of the wildfire areas in California in August, Zinke blamed "blatant mismanagement of forests" because of restrictions on timber harvesting that he said were supported by "environmental terrorist groups".

Pressed by reporters on Wednesday, Zinke objected. "It's really not the time to point fingers," he said. "There is a time for America to stay together."

The fire, fueled by a thick scrubland parched by drought, has crowned two consecutive catastrophic forest fires in California, which scientists largely attribute to a prolonged drought that they say is symptomatic of climate change. .

Lawyers for some of the victims claimed in a complaint filed on Wednesday that lax maintenance of equipment by an electricity supplier was the immediate cause of the fire, which is officially the subject of An investigation.

The Butte County disaster coincided with a wave of fires in Southern California, including the Woolsey Fire, which killed at least two people, destroyed more than 500 structures and displaced about 200,000 people. people west of Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said that the body of a possible third victim had been found. Cal Fire officials said the fire was under control by 52 percent on Wednesday night.

In Butte County, the search for more human remains has grown as a contingent of the National Guard consisting of 50 military police officers has joined dozens of other people. Search and salvage employees and at least 22 dead dogs, said Sheriff Kory Honea.

The remains of eight other fire victims were discovered Wednesday, bringing to 56 the official death toll, far exceeding the previous record of a single fire in California's history: 29 people killed by the Griffith Park fire in Los Angeles in 1933.

The campfire is also one of the deadliest forest fires in the United States since the beginning of the last century. More than 80 people died in the storm of the Big Burn fire that swept the Northern Rockies in August 1910.

FOLLOW THE MISSING

Butte County Sheriff spokeswoman Megan McMann said the list of 130 disappeared would fluctuate daily as new names were added and others would be removed, either because They would be safe, be found among the dead.

Sheriff Honea has invited relatives of the missing to provide DNA samples to be compared with samples taken from newly found remains, in hopes of speeding up the identification of the dead. He said that it was possible that part of the missing people would never be found again.

The authorities attributed the magnitude of the losses to the staggering speed with which the fire hit paradise. The wind-blown flames passed through the city so quickly that people were forced to flee for their lives. Some victims were found in or around the burned wreckage of their vehicles.

(For a chart on fatal fires in California, click tmsnrt.rs/2Plu)