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Smoke from wildfires that posed a health hazard to millions of people suffocated the west coast of the US as firefighters battled deadly fires that ravaged some cities and displaced tens of thousands of people.
The death toll from the fires in California, Oregon and Washington rose to 31 and was expected to rise dramatically. Most of the deaths occurred in California and Oregon.
Oregon’s director of emergency management said officials were preparing for a possible “mass death event” if many more bodies turn up in the ashes. And the state fire marshal resigned after being abruptly put on administrative leave. The state police superintendent said the crisis called for an urgent response that required a change of leadership.
Those who still had homes were not safe in them. Half a million Oregonians were under evacuation warnings or orders to leave. With air pollution levels at record highs, people placed towels under doors to keep smoke out. Some even wore N95 masks in their own homes.
Some communities resembled the cities of Europe bombed after World War II, with buildings reduced to charred rubble piled on blackened earth. If residents did not manage to flee when the flames approached, they perished.
Millicent Catarancuic’s body was found near a car on her 2ha (five acre) property in Berry Creek, California. The flames came so fast that he didn’t have time to get out. On Tuesday, he put several of his cats and dogs in the car, but then called his daughter to tell her that he had decided to stay. Firefighters had made progress in fighting the blaze. The wind was calm. The flames still seemed far away. They then ran toward the property. “I feel like, maybe when they passed by, they had an army of cats and dogs with her to help her,” said her daughter, Holly Catarancuic.
In Oregon alone, more than 40,000 people have been evacuated and about 500,000 are at different levels of evacuation zones, according to Gov. Kate Brown.
Fires along Oregon’s Cascade Range grew on Saturday, but at a slower rate than earlier in the week, when strong easterly winds acted as a bellows, pushing two large fires, in Beachie Creek and Riverside, one towards the other and towards the great population centers of the state. , including the southeastern suburbs of Portland. Fire officials had good news: higher humidity significantly reduced the flames.
In California, a total of 28 large active fires have burned 1,1330 square kilometers (4,375 square miles) and 16,000 firefighters are trying to douse the flames, said Cal Fire Deputy Assistant Director Daniel Berlant. Large wildfires also continued to burn in northeast Washington state. In all, 22 people have died in California since wildfires began to break out across the state in mid-August.
Donald Trump will visit California on Monday for an IR briefing, the White House announced. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and the governors of the states of California, Oregon and Washington, all Democrats, have said the fires are a consequence of global warming. “It is absolutely necessary to act now to avoid a future defined by an endless barrage of tragedies like the one American families are suffering in the West today,” Biden said.
The same smoke that painted California skies orange also helped crews corner the state’s deadliest fire of the year by blocking out the sun, lowering temperatures and increasing humidity, authorities said. The smoke also created colder conditions in Oregon, but it was also blamed for producing the dirtiest air in at least 35 years in some places. The air quality index reading Saturday morning in Salem, the state capital, was 512. The scale typically runs from zero to 500. “Above 500 is literally off the charts,” said Laura Gleim, spokeswoman. from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. . Because air quality in the past was rarely this bad, the government’s yardstick for measuring it was 500, Gleim said. The department began monitoring air quality in 1985.
The weather conditions that led to the fires and fueled the flames were likely a once-in-a-generation event, said Greg Jones, a professor and researcher climatologist at Linfield University in McMinnville, Oregon.
A large area of high pressure stretching from the desert to the southwest to Alaska brought strong easterly winds to the west coast, reducing relative humidity by 8% and bringing desert conditions, even to the coast, Jones said. Instead of the offshore flows normally enjoyed by the Pacific Northwest, strong easterly winds pushed the fires toward the western slopes of the Cascade Range. It’s unclear whether global warming caused the conditions, Jones said, but a warmer world can increase the likelihood of extreme events and contribute to their severity.
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