Deadly wildfires raging across Oregon kept half a million people under evacuation alert on Saturday as President Donald Trump announced plans to visit California for a close-up view of damage wrought by the largest fires in the state’s history.
Thousands of homes have burned down in recent days in Oregon, which has become the latest epicentre in a larger summer outbreak of fires sweeping the western United States, collectively scorching a landscape the size of New Jersey and killing at least 25 people.
In California, tens of thousands of firefighters were battling 28 major wildfires across California as of Saturday morning, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Most were being contained to some degree except for one in Siskiyou County, which grew out of control.
The White House said Mr Trump, a Republican, will meet with local and federal officials in McClellan Park near the California state capital of Sacramento on Monday after travelling to Nevada for a fundraiser and a pair of rallies for his campaign to be re-elected in November.
He has been sharply critical of California in the past for allowing conditions that he says permit wildfires.
His Democratic opponent, the former senator and vice president Joe Biden, said in a statement on Saturday that the wildfires showed there was “no challenge more consequential to our future than meeting and defeating the onrushing climate crisis".
The firestorms, some of the largest on record in California and Oregon, were driven by high winds that howled across the region for days in the midst of record-breaking heat.
A charred vehicle is seen in the parking lot of the burned Oak Park Motel after the passage of the Santiam Fire in Gates, Oregon, on 10 September, 2020. Source: AFP
Scientists say global warming has also contributed to extremes in wet and dry seasons, causing vegetation to flourish then dry out, leaving more abundant fuel for wildfires.
With at least five people already confirmed dead from the fires in Oregon this week, state officials warned of possible “mass fatality incidents” as they searched scorched ruins for dozens of people who had been reported missing.
The Pacific Northwest as a whole has borne the brunt of an incendiary onslaught that began around Labor Day, darkening the sky with smoke and ash that has beset northern California, Oregon and Washington with some of the world’s worst air-quality levels.
'The perfect storm'
“This is a climate damn emergency. This is real and it’s happening. This is the perfect storm,” California Governor Gavin Newsom told reporters on Friday from a charred mountainside near Oroville, California.
More than 4,000 homes and other structures have been incinerated in California alone over the past three weeks.
In southern Oregon, an apocalyptic scene of charred residential subdivisions and trailer parks stretched for miles along Highway 99 south of Medford through the neighbouring towns of Phoenix and Talent, one of the most devastated areas.
Molalla, a community about 40 km south of downtown Portland, was an ash-covered ghost town after its more than 9,000 residents were told to evacuate, with only 30 refusing to leave, the city’s fire department said.
The logging town was on the front line of a vast evacuation zone stretching north to within 4.8 km of downtown Portland.
In Portland, the Multnomah County Sheriff chastised residents who had taken it upon themselves to set up checkpoints and stop cars after conspiracy theories spread that left-wing activists who oppose Mr Trump were starting some of the blazes, which local authorities say is groundless.
Governor Brown told a news conference that more than 500,000 people were under one of three evacuation alert levels, advising them to pack and be vigilant, to be ready to flee at a moment’s notice, or to leave immediately. About 40,000 of those had already been ordered to leave.
Shawn Thompson hugs Melissa Vuckovich after an unsuccessful search for their missing cat where their home once stood in Ashland, Oregon on 11 September. Source: Getty Images North America
Break in the weather
After four days of treacherously hot, windy weather, a glimmer of hope arrived in the form of calmer winds blowing in from the ocean, bringing cooler, moister conditions that helped firefighters make headway against blazes that had burned largely unchecked earlier in the week.
The overall death toll from the Western fires that began in August jumped to 25 after seven people were reported killed in mountains north of Sacramento, California, and Oregon’s fifth fatality was reported in Marion County, outside of Salem, the state capital.
Paradise, a town blasted by California’s deadliest wildfire in 2018, posted the world’s worst air quality index reading at 592, according to the PurpleAir monitoring site, as two of the state’s largest blazes burned on either side of it.
