Wildfires: Prepared for a Mass Death

At least four people have been found dead in the fires, and many remain missing in fires in southern Oregon near Medford and north near the state capital Salem, Brown said Friday afternoon local time. .

The fires are taking place in areas that together total more than 400,000 hectares, which is a new record. The powerful fires have forced 40,000 residents to flee their homes and 500,000 have been told to evacuate or prepare for it. It’s an adjustment since Thursday, when authorities ordered half a million residents of the state to evacuate.

The wildfire has also moved closer to Portland, giving the city the worst air quality in the world, according to the Swiss company IQAir. A state of emergency has been introduced in the city area and its surroundings.

MISSING: Many people have not been accounted for in the powerful fires that are ravaging the state of Oregon on the west coast of the United States. In the southern states of Phoenix and Talent, about 600 homes were destroyed by the fires. Photo: Scott Stoddard / Grants Pass Daily Courier via AP / NTB scanpix
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– Mass death

“We are preparing for mass deaths, based on what we know and the number of buildings lost,” Andrew Phelps, director of the Oregon Crisis and Emergency Management Agency, said at a news conference Friday.

Governor Brown says preliminary police reports indicate that many are missing outside Portland.

Mortality rates are increasing

California fears

More than 20,000 firefighters are fighting the blaze on the west coast of the United States, and 16 people have lost their lives this week in fires in the states of California, Oregon and Washington.

The fires in California are on an unprecedented scale. One of them, called the August Complex Four, is larger than any other known fire in California history. It started about 40 different smaller fires and now covers an area of ​​more than 302,000 hectares, more than 3,000 square kilometers.

“We expect the death toll to increase when we investigate areas that have been devastated by fire and when smoke subsides,” California Govin Newsom said when he visited a fire-ravaged area near the so-called North Complex fire on Friday.

Warns: “Era of megafires”

Many fires

A total of 28 major fires are active in California and this year they have burned an area of ​​1.25 million acres. It is an area 26 times larger than last year.

The deadliest of the fires is the North Complex Fire in Northern California. So far ten lives have been claimed and another sixteen are missing.

At the same time, people in the city of Paradise, where 85 people died in a forest fire in 2018, have been told to prepare for evacuation.

A video from The Oregonian newspaper shows the city of Blue River, with about 800 inhabitants, which is black and completely charred.

THICK SMOKE: So far this week, 16 people have lost their lives in the fire in the states of California, Oregon and Washington. Thick smoke covers much of the west coast of the United States, like here in Seattle, Washington. Photo: Erika Schultz / The Seattle Times via AP / NTB scanpix
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Better weather ahead

Fires on the west coast of the United States increased as a result of strong winds and high temperatures last week.

Gov. Kate Brown now hopes that the worst is over and that better weather can help control the fires.

– We expect cooler and more humid air in the coming days, which is very good news, says Brown.