More than 500,000 people in Oregon were under evacuation orders on Thursday as unprecedented wildfires rage across the state, amounting to more than 10% of the population, authorities said.
Wildfires searing through the American west have killed at least 15 people, leveled entire neighborhoods and forced stretched firefighting crews to make tough decisions about where to deploy.
The situation is especially acute in Oregon where fire conditions not seen in three decades have fueled huge blazes that have killed at least three people, destroyed at least five towns and forced the evacuation of communities from the southern border to the Portland suburbs.
On Thursday night, Donald Trump approved an emergency declaration in the state, enabling federal assistance to bolster local efforts.
Oregon’s governor, Kate Brown, said on Thursday that more than 900,000 acres have burned across the state in the last several days – nearly double the amount of land that usually burns in a typical year. “We have never seen this amount of uncontained fire across the state,” Brown said.
Official statements saying that 500,000 people had been evacuated were later clarified by local news reports. An estimate half a million people were some form of an evacuation order, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported. Cory Grogan, a spokesperson for the Oregon office of emergency management, told the Guardian the number was calculated by determining how many people live in mandatory evacuation zones.
Reuters reported that about 10% of the state’s population faced red “Go!” warnings to leave homes immediately, while hundreds of thousands more were under yellow “Be Set” warnings, to leave at a moment’s notice, or green “Be Ready” alerts.
The Oregon Office of Emergency Management said wildfire activity was made even more dangerous in northwestern Oregon as hot, windy conditions continued. Arson investigators have opened a probe into the suspicious origins of a deadly fire that began in the town of Ashland and destroyed hundreds of homes.
In northern California’s Butte county, where the town of Paradise was devastated by the deadly Camp fire in 2018, at least 10 people have died and 16 are missing amid the North Complex fire currently burning through the region.
More than 17,000 firefighters are involved in battling the blazes.
Brown said there have been fatalities in Oregon but the exact number is not yet known. There have been at least three reported fire deaths in the state. Two of the deaths occurred in Marion county, where the sheriff late on Wednesday confirmed two people fleeing the uncontained Santiam fire had been found dead in their car. The sheriff’s office later posted a news story to their Facebook page, identifying the pair as a 12-year-old boy and his grandmother.
The deaths occurred 30 miles downstream from Detroit, Oregon, one of five towns in the state that Brown said had been “substantially destroyed” in a series of conflagrations concentrated in the state’s more populous western third. The fires have already consumed “hundreds of homes”.
The Santiam fire forced the evacuation of the whole of the eastern portion of Marion county, and shrouded Salem in thick smoke, which cast an eerie, blood red light on Oregon’s state capital for much of Wednesday.
Another death was confirmed in Jackson county in the state’s far south, where Sheriff Nate Sickler told a press briefing the Almeda fire had claimed at least one life. That fire started in Ashland on Tuesday and moved quickly north, destroying the towns of Talent and Phoenix, and forcing the evacuation of much of the city of Medford.
Sickler said that fire is now the subject of a criminal investigation, which is seeking to determine whether it was deliberately lit.
Two other towns that were destroyed, Blue River and Vida, are located on the banks of the McKenzie River, east of the city of Eugene, and some 60 miles south of the Santiam Canyon.
This week’s fires did not just affect rural areas: Wednesday saw evacuation orders in Clackamas county, including south-eastern suburbs of Portland, and rural parts of Washington county, which also takes in the city’s western suburbs.
By Wednesday evening, that city was blanketed with smoke from fires burning around its forested south-eastern fringe, and in rural areas to the south-west.
The explosion of fires across the region were stoked by dry winds, and a record heatwave – and fueled by widespread drought, which dried out vegetation into kindling.
The early part of the week saw gusts of up to 50mph in western areas, downing trees and power lines in Portland and other cities. The rare weather, more characteristic of winter storms in the region, was accompanied by historically low relative humidity.
The conditions led to an unprecedented “extremely critical” fire weather warning for southern Oregon on Monday, and only the second such warning in state history for north-west Oregon.
A week earlier, on 3 September, parts of the Portland metro area recorded their highest ever temperature for that date. Like much of the rest of the country, Oregon has recorded higher than average temperatures throughout the summer. In addition, much of the state, including Jackson county, is in moderate to severe drought, with Oregon’s climate office pointing to extremely dry soils as a contributing factor to the wildfires.
In Washington state, a one-year-old boy died after his family was apparently overrun by flames while trying to flee a wildfire, the Okanogan county sheriff, Tony Hawley, said. Fires in the state have burned nearly 937 sq miles, governor Jay Inslee said on Thursday.
“We’ve had this trauma all over Washington,” Inslee said, KHQ-TV reported. The governor was touring the farm town of Malden, which is 35 miles south of Spokane: “But this is the place where the whole heart of the town was torn out.”
Malden’s mayor, Chris Ferrell, said residents only had minutes to evacuate, but said no one was killed or seriously injured. More than 80% of the homes in Malden were destroyed by the flames.
Inslee said low humidity, high temperatures and winds combined to make the blaze probably one of “the most catastrophic fires we’ve had in the history of the state”.
“California, Oregon, Washington, we are all in the same soup of cataclysmic fire,” the governor said.
California, which has been battling a barrage of fires since August, has within the last few weeks seen the first, third, fourth, ninth, 10th and 18th-largest wildfires in state history, according to the National Weather Service.
By Thursday, the deadly North Complex fire, which has been growing explosively, had displaced about 20,000 and destroyed 2,ooo structures, authorities said. The town of Oroville, which three years ago was evacuated when heavy rains threatened to collapse a major dam, was evacuated once again as the flames charged toward it.
“Time and time again we have seen how dangerous wildfires can be. So I ask that you please, please, please be prepared, maintain situational awareness and heed the warnings,” said the Butte county sheriff, Kory Honea.
In the town of Paradise, Wednesday’s conditions – cherry skies and falling ash – reminded many of the fire that killed 85 people in 2018. “It was extremely frightening and ugly,” said the former mayor Steve “Woody” Culleton. “Everybody has PTSD and whatnot, so it triggered everybody and caused terror and panic.”
Authorities said one person died in Siskiyou county in northern California.
Even in the midst of its dry, hot, windy fire season, California has experienced wildfires advancing with unprecedented speed and ferocity. Since the middle of August, fires in California have killed 12 people, destroyed more than 3,600 buildings, burned old growth redwoods, charred chaparral and forced evacuations in communities near the coast, in wine country north of San Francisco and along the Sierra Nevada. Authorities said the August Complex fire is now officially the largest fire on record in the state’s history, having scorched more than 736 sq miles (1,906 sq km).
In some areas of the San Francisco Bay Area and to the east in the Sacramento Valley, smoke blocked out so much sunlight on Wednesday that it dropped the temperature by 20 to 30 degrees over the previous day, according to the National Weather Service.
The US Forest Service, which had taken the unprecedented measure of closing eight national forests in southern California earlier in the week, ordered all 18 of its forests in the state closed Wednesday for public safety.
Fires burned in Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego counties. People in foothill communities east of LA were warned to be ready to flee, but the region’s notorious Santa Ana winds were weaker than predicted.
“We’re encouraged that the wind activity appears to be dying down,” Governor Gavin Newsom said. “The rest of the week looks a little more favorable.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report
This article was updated on 11 September 2020. Initial press statements from the Oregon office of emergency management said that 500,000 people had been evacuated. However, it was later clarified by the Guardian and other news outlets that 500,000 were under evacuation orders.
