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The roughly one hundred major wildfires underway in the western United States have burned more than 18,000 square kilometers, an area equal to Veneto, in twelve states and killed at least 26 people, from mid-August to today. The worst affected states are California, Oregon and Washington.
In Oregon, where the most recent fires have raged, flames have virtually destroyed the southern towns of Phoenix and Talent, and dozens of people are missing: authorities said many bodies of people who did not manage to escape in time when firefighters entered the burning neighborhoods.
Roughly 500,000 people have been evacuated from their homes or received a warning to prepare to do so – that’s more than 10 percent of the state’s total population. For 40,000 of them, the evacuation order was mandatory: State Governor Kate Brown urged citizens to respect the order to leave their homes despite fear of looting.
There are currently 35 different fires in Oregon (there were nearly 50 at the beginning of the week) and about 3,600 square kilometers have burned so far, Kate Brown’s office said: Over the past decade, the annual average number of forests burned was just 2,000 square kilometers, which is why Brown said this year’s fires are unprecedented. On Thursday, Ted Wheeler, mayor of Portland, the state’s largest city, declared a state of emergency, evacuating some areas and closing city parks. In the city of Phoenix, a man was charged with voluntarily starting a minor fire as the larger “Almeda Fire” approached.
– Read also: Remember the great fires in Australia?
In California, however, more than 12,000 square kilometers have been burned since the beginning of the year: according to data from Cal Fire, the state department that deals with wildfires, it is 26 times the area burned in the first eight months of 2019. Six of the twenty largest fires ever recorded in California occurred this year – rising temperatures caused by climate change are one of the causes of these increasingly large and frequent fires.
Lastly, about 2,500 square kilometers burned in Washington state according to the National Interagency Fire Center. In all states affected by the fires, firefighters are still working to try to contain or stop them.
– Read also: Those who photograph the fires in California
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