Dozens of people remain missing in Oregon as wildfires that have torched millions of acres of land across the West continue to burn, the death toll has risen to 17 and smoke was choking residents in cities far from the fires.
In Oregon, where more than 1 million acres have burned, fires have destroyed entire towns and forced 40,000 residents to evacuate.
With the blazes still spreading and many homes destroyed, Oregon’s director of emergency management said the state feared a “mass fatality incident.”
Oregon, Washington, and California are all under assault from a wildfire season of historic proportions, with the firefighting effort compounded by the coronavirus pandemic and misinformation online. Already, California has seen more than 2.2 million acres go up in flames, nearly nine times what burned in 2019, and officials warn that more fires are likely.
One official from California said on Friday that he feared more bodies would be found and described the scale of the battle firefighters were in as unprecedented. One of the fire complexes burning this week became the largest in the state’s history and has now burned across 747,000 acres.
A half-million people in Oregon were ordered to evacuate as of Friday as scores of wildfires ate up the parched countryside, smoke darkening skies across the state, along with neighboring California and Washington. At least 24 people have died since the fires began last month. Authorities say they expect to find much more dead when they can inspect hard-hit areas.
In Phoenix, the smoke was still thick in the air as many of its 4,600 residents tried to grasp the extent of the damage. Local authorities said the fire destroyed a large swath of the town. State fire officials said at least two people were killed and four injured, and that the fire was 20% contained as of Friday afternoon.
Matt Manson stared at the burned-out corpse of his pick-up truck on Friday, which sat on a blackened driveway in front of a smoldering pile of rubble that once was his house.
Like other residents of the small agricultural town of Phoenix, Oregon, he was in shock as he returned to his neighborhood and saw how fast the Alameda Drive wildfire had engulfed his home and upended his life.
“The fire melted the motor right out of my truck – it drained down the driveway,” said Manson, a 43-year-old construction worker. “I lost everything. I lost all of my tools. My truck. I can’t work. I lost $30,000 worth of guitars. All gone.”
Manson, who now owns only a backpack with a change of clothes, struggled to find the words to describe how the fire had ravaged the town that sits near the green Siskiyou Mountains, about 210 miles south of Portland. Trees lining his street were now just blackened, skeletal remains.
“It looks like a war just happened here,” he said.
Doris Peterson, 85, said she only had time to grab Toby, her 12-year-old Chihuahua, when she and her husband, Richard, fled after police banged on their door Tuesday about noon and told them they had just minutes to get out.
They spent five hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic before finding a hotel room in Grants Pass, Oregon – 35 miles up Interstate 5.
On Friday she and her husband sat in their car at a baseball field just north of Phoenix, waiting to be escorted into their neighborhood by police. She was bracing for the worst, but still hoped for a miracle.
“I called my landline phone – and the answering machine picked up!” she said. “My next-door neighbor’s will not pick up. Maybe our house survived.”