103 wildfires rage throughout western US, killing seven individuals in California, Washington and Oregon
One of the 28 major fires ravaging California has officially become the largest blaze in the state’s history.
The August Complex, which started as more than 30 separate fires in the Mendocino National Forest on August 17, has since burned more than 471,000 acres in and around Tehama County – surpassing the 2018 Mendocino Complex fire.
The complex- which is just 24 percent contained – has destroyed more than 26 structures and killed at least one person. It secured the title of California’s largest-ever fire on Thursday, as the state weathers its worst most destructive year on record.
More than 100 wildfires are currently raging across 12 western states, scorching more than 3.4 million acres and leaving seven people dead in California, Oregon and Washington.
At least five towns have been razed by blazes ripping across the drought-stricken West Coast as hundreds of thousands of people are evacuated under apocalyptic skies stained orange and red by smoke.
The fast-moving fires have already claimed the lives of seven people who failed to flee before flames engulfed their communities.
In Washington state, a one-year-old boy named Uriel was killed and his parents Jake and Jamie Hyland were severely burned when they were trapped by the Cold Springs Fire in Okanogan County.
In Oregon, 12-year-old Wyatt Tofte and his grandmother Peggy Mosso died in a blaze in the Santiam Valley community of Lyons, about 50 miles south of Portland. The boy’s mother is currently in hospital in critical condition after suffering serious burns.
Another person was killed by the Alameda Fire 250 miles away in Ashland – as Oregon Governor Kate Brown warned: ‘This could be the greatest loss of human lives and property due to wildfire in our state’s history.’
In California, three people died when the Bear Fire swept through Butte County on Tuesday night.
Dramatic aerial photographs captured the massive destruction wrought by wildfires across all three states – while drone footage showed San Francisco sitting under a stunning orange haze blanketed by smoke.
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The August Complex in Northern California became the largest fire in the state’s history on Thursday. Firefighers are seen battling the blaze in its first week on August 23
The map above shows 103 fires that have already burned more than 3.4 million acres across the western United States
Butte county firefighters watch as flames tower over their truck during the Bear Fire in Oroville, California, on Wednesday
At least five towns have been razed by blazes ripping across the drought-stricken West Coast as hundreds of thousands of people are evacuated. Pictured: Two young children look at a charred bicycle in Phoenix, Oregon, after a fire ripped through
The Reyes family looks at the destruction of their home at Coleman Creek Estates mobile home park in Phoenix, Oregon
Drone footage captured the eerie orange haze hanging over San Francisco as two massive fires loom nearby
Jake and Jamie Hyland were severely burned and their one-year-old son Uriel was killed as the family fled from a wildfire in Okanogan County, Washington, on Sunday night
Wyatt Tofte, 12, (far left) and his grandmother Peggy Mosso (far right in red) died in a wildfire burning near the Santiam Valley community of Lyons, about 50 miles south of Portland. The boy’s mother is currently in hospital in critical condition
MEDFORD, OREGON: Northridge Terrace is seen left in September 2019 and right after it was razed by this week’s West Coast wildfires which have ravaged communities and brought apocalyptic orange skies
TALENT, OREGON: Mountain View Estates in September 2019 (left) and September 2020 (right) after the massive wildfires. Only ‘smoldering ruins’ remained of large parts of the town of Talent, local resident Sandra Spelliscy said
MEDFORD, OREGON: These satellite images show the destruction in western Oregon where officials fear more deaths
PHOENIX, OREGON: A close-up of the city of 4,500 people which has been devastated by the Alameda Fire
TALENT, OREGON: The Rogue Valley Highway 99 in June 2018 (left) and on Wednesday this week (right)
OREGON COAST: A satellite image of the state’s Pacific coast in December 2016 (left) and September 2020 (right)
PHOENIX, OREGON: This infrared satellite image shows an overview of the destruction, with burned vegetation and property in black and grey, and healthy vegetation that has not been burned in red
One-year-old boy is killed and his parents are severely burned as they fled Washington wildfire
Jake and Jamie Hyland and their infant son Uriel were evacuating their property in rural Okanogan at around midnight on Sunday when they got trapped by the Cold Springs Fire.
The family’s scorched truck was found abandoned on Tuesday afternoon, before search teams discovered Jake and Jamie, who is pregnant, gravely injured on the banks of the Columbia River. Baby Uri was already dead.
The parents were transported to Three Rivers Hospital in Brewster before being airlifted to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.
Jamie, 26, suffered burns covering 40 to 50 percent of her body and underwent surgery on her arms, a relative wrote on a GoFundMe page.
Jake, 31, was burned on 25 percent of his body and was preparing for surgery on his arms as well.
‘They are both still critical at this point, but Jamie is more so than Jake,’ the relative wrote.
The Hyland family, who live outside Portland in Renton, had been visiting their house in Okanogan for Labor Day weekend.
The relative said the remote property doesn’t have cell service, so it’s possible the family didn’t receive alerts about the fire blazing toward them until it was too late to evacuate safely.
The Cold Springs Fire erupted near Omak on Sunday night and has already torched more than 163,000 acres. It was 10 percent contained as of Wednesday night.
The cause of the fire has not been determined, but Okanogan County Sheriff Tony Hawley said Uri’s death will be treated as a homicide if it turns out to be an arson.
Hawley praised the efforts of firefighters battling blazes around his community but expressed frustration with a lack of resources.
He attributed aid delays to the fact that dozens of wildfires are currently burning across the state of Washington and around the western US.
‘We’re competing for resources just like everyone across the nation,’ he said.
Across the United States wildfires have burned nearly 4.7 million acres in 2020, the highest year-to-date area since 2018, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
Most of the fires are in western states, where 17 new large blazes were reported on Wednesday, bringing the total to 90 that have burned more than 3.4 million acres – an area nearly the size of Connecticut.
Only ‘smoldering ruins’ remained of large parts of the town of Talent, Oregon, said local resident Sandra Spelliscy.
‘There are numerous neighborhoods where there are no structures left standing… dozens of homes [gone] and literally nothing except the skeletons of a chimney or an appliance,’ she said.
Firefighters retreated from uncontrollable blazes in Oregon as officials gave residents ‘go now’ orders to evacuate, meaning they had only minutes to leave their homes.
‘It was like driving through hell,’ Jody Evans told local television station NewsChannel21 after a midnight evacuation from Detroit, about 50 miles west of Salem.
In Okanogan County, Washington, the Hyland family got trapped by the Cold Springs Fire as they evacuated their property near Omak on Sunday night.
The family’s scorched truck was found abandoned on the side of a road on Tuesday afternoon, before search and rescue teams discovered dad Jake and mom Jamie, who is pregnant, gravely injured on the banks of the Columbia River. Their one-year-old son Uri was already dead.
Jamie, 26, suffered burns covering 40 to 50 percent of her body and underwent surgery on her arms, a relative wrote in on a GoFundMe page.
Jake, 31, was burned on 25 percent of his body and was preparing for surgery on his arms as well.
To the south in Butte County, California, Sheriff Kory Honea confirmed that three people have died in the Bear Fire. Their identities have not yet been released.
The remains of three victims were found in two separate locations of the same fire, Honea said, bringing the total death toll from this summer’s devastating spate of California wildfires to at least 11.
Hornea said at least 12 people remain missing in Butte County as the Bear Fire rages on.
Leanna Mikesler, from Clovis, California, said she had been forced to evacuate her home to escape wildfires before, but it was ’10 times harder’ during the coronavirus pandemic.
‘They call… the evacuation. And then you go from there to see if your house has been burned down,’ she said.
Over a century of efforts by federal and state agencies to suppress naturally occurring blazes have left forests replete with dry timber and brush that provides fuel for large wildfires.
Home construction has encroached on some forests in recent decades, and owners are watching their houses burn as firefighters are unable to save property.
Half-dozen fire experts who spoke to AP agreed that more extreme fire behavior in recent years has been driven by drought and warming temperatures they attribute to climate change. Among the most concerning developments is that fast-moving wildfires leave less time for warnings or evacuations.
Recently ‘we have seen multiple fires expand by tens of thousands of acres in a matter of hours, and 30 years or more ago that just wasn’t fire behavior that we saw,’ said Jacob Bendix, a professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University who studies wildfires.
Hotter temperatures, longer fire seasons and an estimated 140 million dead trees from a five-year drought mean that ‘fires in California are moving faster and growing larger’, said University of Utah fire expert Philip Dennison.
Mike Flannigan, who directs the Western Partnership for Wildland Fire Science at Canada’s University of Alberta, remembers the first report of a fire-created thunderstorm in 1986.
‘They were rare events, and now they’ve become commonplace,’ he said. ‘It’s because these fires are higher intensity.’
The San Francisco Bay Bridge and the city skyline are bathed in apocalyptic orange as smoke and haze blows over the city, as seen from the artificial Treasure Island
San Francisco skyline is seen from Dolores Park in San Francisco, California on September 9. More than 300,000 acres are burning across the northwestern state including 35 major wildfires, with at least five towns ‘substantially destroyed’ and mass evacuations taking place
A view of the San Francisco Bay Bridge under an orange sky in the afternoon in San Francisco, California. The blazes across the states have made major metropolitan areas look apocalyptic
The Bobcat fire rages above Rincon Fire Station on Highway 39 in the San Gabriel Mountains, California
A singed ice machine sits over a burned store during the Bear Fire, part of the North Lightning Complex fires, in unincorporated Butte County, California on Wednesday
Brown smoke from wildfires blowing westward in the atmosphere from California’s Sierra Nevada to the Coast Ranges and from Oregon can be seen on Wednesday
A satellite image shows wildfires near Colton, Oregon on Wednesday as the scores of wildfires continued to rage
Interstate 5 is seen on the left as the Bear Lakes Estates neighborhood in Phoenix, Oregon, is left devastated
Homes were essentially wiped from the map as the fire took hold and laid claim to everything in its path, blown by the wind
A prime example is the so-called Creek Fire in Sierra National Forest near Yosemite National Park, which exploded through miles of drought- and beetle-killed timber, moving so fast that it trapped hundreds of campers.
‘When you have a fire run 15 miles in one day, in one afternoon, there’s no model that can predict that,’ US Forest Service forester Steve Lohr said. ‘The fires are behaving in such a way that we’ve not seen.’
Daniel Berlant, a spokesman for California’s state fire authority, said of the Creek Fire: ‘You add the winds, the dry conditions, the hot temperatures, it’s the perfect recipe. This fire is just burning at an explosive rate.’
The phenomenon isn’t restricted to California. Doug Grafe, chief of Fire Protection at the Oregon Department of Forestry, said it was unprecedented in his state for fires this week to spread from the crest of the Cascade Mountains into the valleys below, and so quickly, ‘carrying tens of miles in one period of an afternoon and not slowing down in the evening – (there is) absolutely no context for that in this environment’.
Winds of up to 50 miles per hour sent blazes racing tens of miles within hours, burning hundreds of homes as firefighters fought at least 35 major blazes across an area of Oregon nearly twice the size of New York City.
Parts of Medford, Oregon, a popular retirement location with over 80,000 residents in the state’s scenic Rogue Valley, were under evacuation orders or warnings as a growing wildfire closed a section of Interstate 5, the primary north-south highway in the West.
The fire moved north to Medford from Ashland, where it started on Tuesday. The blaze did little damage to Ashland, home to the historic stages of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which normally draws more than 350,000 theatergoers a year.
The Holiday Farm fire is seen burning in the mountains around McKenzie Bridge, Oregon on September 9, 2020
Three chairs are all that remain at the Gates Post office in Gates, Oregon on Wednesday. The post office was destroyed along with several other buildings in the Santiam Canyon community as a result of the Santiam Fire
A swing and a burned-out vehicle are seen after the Bear Fire tore through Berry Creek, California
A scorched car rests in a clearing following the Bear Fire in Butte County. The blaze, part of the lightning-sparked North Complex, expanded at a critical rate of spread as winds buffeted the region
A plume rises from the Bear Fire as it burns along Lake Oroville in Butte County, California
In central California, the Creek Fire about 35 miles north of Fresno tore through a forest killed by drought and bark beetles as military helicopters pulled campers, hikers and residents out of the area.
On Wednesday morning, people in San Francisco and elsewhere in California woke to a deep orange sky that triggered apocalyptic visions in a year already rife with disturbing events.
Skies so dark at times that it appeared more night than day were accompanied in some places with ash falling like snow, the cause being massive wild fires filling the air with smoke and cinders.
‘The orange skies this morning are a result of wildfire smoke in the air,’ San Francisco Bay air quality officials said in a tweet.
President Barack Obama tweeted his concern over the dangers of climate change and urged voters to hit the polls
‘These smoke particles scatter blue light and only allow yellow-orange-red light to reach the surface, causing skies to look orange.’
As smoke gets thick in some areas, it blocks sunlight causing dark skies, the officials explained.
Photos of the eerie scene, particularly of a San Francisco skyline fit for a dystopian science fiction film, spread quickly on social media.
‘Is there a word for ‘the apocalypse is upon us burnt sienna?’ read one tweet fired off by someone who felt using the word ‘orange’ to describe the sky was being too kind.
Others likened the scenes to planets other than Earth.
‘If literal fire skies don’t wake us up to climate change, then nothing will,’ tweeted YouTube influencer and Zadiko tea startup chief Zack Kornfeld.
‘Enjoy joking about how crazy this year is because we made this mess and it’s only going to get worse.’
Robert Pylant, 65, locates his fire safe in the rubble of his mobile home, early Wednesday in Gates, Oregon. All the trailers in Oak Park Trailer Park were destroyed along with the majority of the homes along East Sorbin Avenue
Hundreds of homes including entire communities were razed by wildfires in the western United States on September 9 as officials warned of potential mass deaths under apocalyptic orange skies
At least five towns were ‘substantially destroyed’ in Oregon as widespread evacuations took place across the northwestern state, governor Kate Brown said
A frightening red haze has been cast over towns in Oregon as 35 wildfires rage around the state
Several Oregon residents shared photos of red-stained skies on social media. The photo above was taken in the middle of the day in Salem
In Southern California, fires burned in Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego counties, and the forecast called for the arrival of the region’s notorious Santa Anas. The hot, dry winds could reach 50 mph at times, forecasters said.
People in a half-dozen foothill communities east of Los Angeles were being told to stay alert because of a fire in the Angeles National Forest.
‘The combination of gusty winds, very dry air, and dry vegetation will create critical fire danger,’ the National Weather Service warned.
The US Forest Service on Monday decided to close all eight national forests in the southern half of the state and shutter campgrounds statewide.
Firefighters have made headway with one blaze in the area – the El Dorado Fire – which was sparked on Saturday by a gender reveal photoshoot, when a pyrotechnical smoke device sent sparks into the bone-dry brush.
The El Dorado Fire has burned more than 12,610 acres as of Tuesday night and is 23 percent contained.
Officials said the family behind the gender reveal debacle could face civil or criminal charges for the fire.
The threat of winds tearing down power lines or hurling debris into them and sparking a wildfire prompted Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s largest utility, to shut off power to 172,000 customers over the weekend.
People gather at Alamo Square under an orange and yellow overcast sky overlooking the The Painted Ladies
A view of Cupid’s Span, a sculpture by Claes Oldenburge and Coosje van Bruggen, in the foreground and the Ferry Building Clock Tower in the background under an orange overcast sky in the afternoon in San Francisco
Under darkened skies from wildfire smoke, a sailboat makes its way past the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and lights at Oracle Park Wednesday
Looking down Lombard Street, Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill at right and the eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, are darkened by wildfire smoke
Smoke hangs over the San Francisco skyline on Wednesday as dozens of wildfires rage across California
California Governor Gavin Newsom on Sunday night declared a state of emergency as his hard-hit state struggled to beat back the blazes.
The Labor Day weekend heat wave fueled new fires that pushed the state to set a new record for number of acres burned with 3.1 million as of Thursday.
The previous record was set just two years ago and included the deadliest fire in state history, the Camp Fire, which ripped through the town of Paradise and killed 85 people in November 2018.
Cal Fire spokeswoman Lynne Tolmachoff said the new record was especially alarming because of how early in the year it was set.
‘It’s a little unnerving because September and October are historically our worst months for fires,’ Tolmachoff told AP. ‘It’s usually hot, and the fuels really dry out. And we see more of our wind events.’
Compared to last year, California has seen over 2,650 more fires and a nearly 2000 percent increase in the acres burned year-to-date (January 1 – September 7), across all jurisdictions, Cal Fire said.
The state has seen 900 wildfires since August 15, many of them started by an intense series of thousands of lightning strikes in mid-August. There have been eight fire deaths and 5,875 structures destroyed as of Thursday.
A Butte County firefighter douses flames at the Bear Fire in Oroville, California, early Wednesday morning
Law enforcement officers watch flames into the air as the Bear Fire continues to spread in Oroville, California, on Wednesday
Similar red skies are seen in Northern California as the Creek Fire continues its path through Fresno County outside Yosemite
Smoke from California wildfires obscures the sky over Oracle Park as the Seattle Mariners take batting practice before their baseball game against the San Francisco Giants on Wednesday in San Francisco
Golfers warm up on the driving range during the preview day of the Safeway Open in Napa, California, on Wednesday
In Washington state, the town of Malden was almost entirely destroyed by a fire earlier in the week.
Whitman County Sheriff Brett Myers said that 70-80 percent of homes in the town of 300 people have gone up in flames.
Local news network KREM showed pictured of the charred Malden post office, a fire still burning inside the gutted building.
The fire station, city hall and other buildings were also consumed, Myers said.
‘The scale of this disaster really can’t be expressed in words,’ he said. ‘The fire will be extinguished, but a community has been changed for a lifetime. I just hope we don’t find the fire took more than homes and buildings. I pray everyone got out in time.’
Larry Frick, who lives in Malden, told KXLY that he spent three hours to save his house amid the flames.
‘It’s gone, brother,’ he texted his sibling after the fire swept through. ‘The entire town is gone. Everything from here to Pine City is gone. The scariest time of my life.’
KREM said that at least nine wildfires were burning throughout the Inland Northwest on Monday, amid dry and windy conditions.
Washington Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz tweeted on Monday evening that, ‘Today alone, almost 300,000 acres in Washington have burned.’
‘Thousands of homes are without power. Many families have had to evacuate their homes and many homes have been lost,’ Franz wrote. ‘We’re still seeing new fire starts in every corner of the state.’
Governor Jay Inslee noted that more acres burned on Monday than in 12 of the last fire seasons in the state.
‘We think all of these are human-caused in some dimension,’ Inslee said.