LOS ANGELES (AP) — A massive wildfire that killed dozens of people and destroyed thousands of homes in Northern California has been fully contained after burning for more than two weeks, authorities said Sunday.
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said the Camp fire had been surrounded by firefighters after several days of rain in the Paradise area.
The nation’s deadliest wildfire in a century killed at least 85 people, and 249 are on a list of those unaccounted for. The number of missing dropped in recent days as officials confirmed that more people were alive.
Crews continued sifting through debris and ash for human remains.
The fire began Nov. 8 in the parched Sierra Nevada foothills and quickly spread across 240 square miles (620 square kilometers), destroying most of Paradise in a day.
Nearly 19,000 buildings, most of them homes, are gone.
The firefight got a boost last week from the first significant winter storm to hit California. It dropped an estimated 7 inches (18 centimeters) of rain over the burn area over a three-day period without causing significant mudslides, said Hannah Chandler-Cooley of the National Weather Service.
In Southern California, more residents returned to areas evacuated in a destructive fire as crews repaired power, telephone and gas utilities.
Los Angeles County sheriff’s officials said they were in the last phase of repopulating Malibu and unincorporated areas of the county. At the height of the fire, 250,000 fled their homes.
Three people died, and 1,643 buildings, most of them homes, were destroyed, officials said.
Sounds like emergency responders will be dealing with a lot of things like this in the future.
And even as people deal with the loss of houses, other vital property, and friends and relatives. Santorum is on TV defending Trump’s talk about raking, saying there’s no scientific consensus on climate change and all the rest. If Trump said Democrats were literal lizard people from the moon, Santorum would find a way to defend it.
The smoke generated by this fire made the air quality all over the SF Bay Area, East Bay and Sacramento the worst in the world for a week. It was like fog, except it was smoke. Not nearly as bad as what the people of Paradise had to go through, but speaks to the immense devastation and size of this problem. Each year the fires are getting larger, more intense and more frequent in California.
And the residents of those cities were extremely lucky. We live south of the July 5 Klamathon Fire, north of the Carr Fire (fire tornado), north of the Delta Fire (shut down I-5, melted semi trucks), northwest of the Hirz Fire, west of the Camp Fire–not to mention a couple dozen other relatively nearby fires. We did not see the sky from July 5 until the first week in October, not once. Everything was hazy and orange and smelled like smoke and everybody felt mildly sick for over three months. And that was all before the Camp Fire.
A depressing statement.