GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — Numerous wildfires burned in Oregon’s forested valleys and along the coast, destroying hundreds of homes and causing mass evacuations. Farther north, flames devoured buildings and huge tracts of land in Washington state.
Officials said the number of simultaneous fires and perhaps the damage caused was unprecedented. Several deaths were reported, including a 1-year-old boy in Washington state. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said communities have been “substantially destroyed” and warned there could be numerous fatalities.
Because of its cool, wet climate, the Pacific Northwest rarely experiences such intense fire activity. But climate change driven by human-caused greenhouse gases is expected to keep warming the region, with most models predicting drier summers, according to the College of the Environment at the University of Washington.
Brown said Oregon could see the greatest loss of life and property from wildfires in state history. The small towns of Phoenix and Talent in southern Oregon were heavily damaged. Another fire leveled most of the small farming town of Malden in eastern Washington — burning down the fire station, post office, City Hall and library.
In Washington state, a fire burned more than 750 square miles of forest, brush and shrubland, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said Wednesday after a 30-minute tour of the fire area in Sumner, east of Tacoma.
Inslee said low humidity, high temperatures and winds combined to likely make the blaze one of “the most catastrophic fires we’ve had in the history of the state.”
Fires were also causing chaos in California, where thousands of homes where threatened today after winds whipped a blaze into a monster that incinerated houses in a small mountain community and killed at least three people.
Several other people have been critically burned and hundreds, if not thousands, of homes and other buildings are believed to have been damaged or destroyed by the fire northeast of San Francisco, authorities said. Experts say the California’s fires are growing bigger and moving faster than they ever have before.
In Oregon, fires erupted along Interstate 5, hitting towns and forcing a shutdown of the main freeway along the West Coast. U.S. Highway 101, the main coastal highway running through California, Oregon and Washington, was also impacted.
At least three people in Oregon and the small child in Washington state were reported killed. In Oregon, authorities said one of the victims from Marion County near Salem was a young boy, whose remains were found alongside those of his dog.
The extent of damage was unclear because so many of the fire zones were too dangerous to survey, said Oregon Deputy State Fire Marshal Mariana Ruiz-Temple.
A mandatory evacuation was ordered in the northern half of Lincoln City, a vacation town of about 10,000 people on the Oregon coast.
“The fire is in the city,” said county Emergency Management spokesman Casey Miller.
Some buildings had been burned, Miller said, but he had no immediate details. Traffic snarled as people tried to drive south. An evacuation center was set up at a community college in Newport.
In Talent, a mobile home park with more than 50 homes was turned into an empty lot except for one lone trailer, said Drew Cutler, who lives in nearby Ashland.
