California wildfire death toll rises to 31, with 228 missing

A tattered flag flies over a burned out home at the Camp Fire, Sunday, Nov. 11, 2018, in Paradise, California. (Photo by JOHN LOCHER / AP)

Updated @ 12:40 a.m., Nov. 12, 2018

PARADISE, California — As wildfires raged at both ends of the state, officials released another grim statistic: six more bodies discovered in the burned-over town of Paradise and outlying areas, bringing the death toll there to 29 and matching the record for the deadliest single blaze in California history.

Statewide the death toll stood at 31, including two dead in Southern California, with authorities still searching for bodies and 228 people unaccounted for.

Ten search teams were working in Paradise — a town of 27,000 that was largely incinerated Thursday — and in surrounding communities in Northern California’s Sierra Nevada foothills.

Authorities called in a DNA lab and anthropologists to help identify what in some cases were only bones or bone fragments.

READ: Deadly fire leveled a California town in less than a day

All told, more 8,000 firefighters battled wildfires that scorched at least 400 square miles (1,040 square kilometers) of the state, with the flames feeding on dry brush and driven by winds that had a blowtorch effect.

Whipping winds and tinder-dry conditions threaten more areas through the rest of the week, fire officials warned.

READ: Winds cause flare-ups of big Southern Californian wildfire

“This is truly a tragedy that all Californians can understand and respond to,” Gov. Jerry Brown said Sunday. “It’s a time to pull together and work through these tragedies.”

California is requesting emergency aid from the Trump administration. President Donald Trump has blamed what he called poor forest management for the fires.

The governor said that the federal and state governments must do more forest management but that climate change is the greater source of the problem.

“And those who deny that are definitely contributing to the tragedies that we’re now witnessing and will continue to witness in the coming years,” Brown said.

Drought and warmer weather attributed to climate change, and the building of homes deeper into forests have led to longer and more destructive wildfire seasons in California. While California officially emerged from a five-year drought last year, much of the northern two-thirds of the state is abnormally dry.

In Southern California , firefighters beat back a new round of winds Sunday and the fire’s growth was believed to have been largely stopped, though extremely low humidity and gusty Santa Ana winds were in the forecast through at least Tuesday.

Some of the thousands of people forced from their homes were allowed to return, and authorities reopened U.S. 101, a major freeway through the fire zone in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

Malibu celebrities and mobile-home dwellers in nearby mountains were slowly learning whether their homes had been spared or reduced to ash. Two people were killed in Malibu, and the fire destroyed at least 180 or so structures.

READ: Southern California fire burns mobile homes, Malibu mansions

As of Sunday night, the fire had grown to more than 344 square kilometers (133 square miles) and was 15 percent contained, authorities said.

Celebrities whose coastal homes were damaged or destroyed or who were forced to flee expressed sympathy for the less famous and offered their gratitude to firefighters. Actor Gerard Butler said on Instagram that his Malibu home was “half-gone,” adding he was “inspired as ever by the courage, spirit and sacrifice of firefighters.”

In Northern California, where more than 6,700 buildings have been destroyed in the blaze that obliterated Paradise, firefighters contended with wind gusts up to 64 kph (40 mph ) overnight, the fire jumping 300 feet across Lake Oroville.

Flames also besieged Thousand Oaks, the Southern California city in mourning over the massacre of 12 people in a shooting rampage at a country music bar on Wednesday night.

READ: Fires besiege California city still reeling from mass shooting

Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said the county consulted teams of anthropologists because, in some cases, investigators have been able to recover only bones and bone fragments.

In some neighborhoods “it’s very difficult to determine whether or not there may be human remains there,” Honea said.

Public safety officials toured the Paradise area to begin discussing the recovery process. Much of what makes the city function is gone.

“Paradise was literally wiped off the map,” said Tim Aboudara, a representative for International Association of Fire Fighters. He said at least 36 firefighters lost their own homes, most in the Paradise area.

READ: Wildfire devastates California town of Paradise

“Anytime you’re a firefighter and your town burns down, there’s a lot of feelings and a lot of guilt and a lot of concern about both what happened and what the future looks like,” he said. “Every story that we’ve heard coming through has been that way, like ’I wish I could have done more, What’s going to happen to our community, Where are my kids going to go to school?’”

Others continued the desperate search for friends or relatives, calling evacuation centers, hospitals, police and the coroner’s office.

Sol Bechtold drove from shelter to shelter looking for his mother, Joanne Caddy, a 75-year-old widow whose house burned down along with the rest of her neighborhood in Magalia, just north of Paradise. She lived alone and did not drive.

As he drove through the smoke and haze to yet another shelter, he said, “I’m also under a dark emotional cloud. Your mother’s somewhere and you don’t know where she’s at. You don’t know if she’s safe.”

The 29 dead in Northern California matched the deadliest single fire on record, a 1933 blaze in Griffith Park in Los Angeles. A series of wildfires in Northern California’s wine country last fall killed 44 people and destroyed more than 5,000 homes.

Firefighters made progress against the blaze, holding containment at 25 percent on Sunday, but they were bracing for gusty winds predicted into Monday morning that could spark “explosive fire behavior,” California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokesman Bill Murphy said.

Fire officials are bracing for potentially more fires in Southern California’s inland region as high winds and critically dry conditions were expected to persist into next week.

“We are really just in the middle of this protracted weather event, this fire siege,” Cal Fire Chief Ken Pimlott said.

He said officials were moving resources and preparing for “the next set of fires” as winds are expected to pick up. The chief warned that fire conditions will continue until the parched state sees rain.

“We are in this for the long haul,” Pimlott said. /atm