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"California fires continue to claim lives and land"

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"California fires continue to claim lives and land"

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California fires continue to claim lives and land

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CNBC's Aditi Roy reports from Camarillo, California on the latest of the California wildfires.

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"Flat tire caused California wildfire, officials say"

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"Flat tire caused California wildfire, officials say"

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The Woolsey Fire (named after Woolsey Canyon Road) is a destructive wildfire burning in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties of the U.S. state of California. The fire ignited on November 8, 2018, and has burned 96,949 acres (39,234 hectares) of land. The fire has destroyed an estimated 1,500 structures,[1] killed 3 people, and prompted the evacuation of more than 295,000 people.[3] It was one of several fires that ignited on the same day. While the nearby Hill Fire was contained with minimal damage on November 16,[4] the Camp Fire in northern California destroyed most of the town of Paradise.[5]

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California officials give update on dangerous wildfires

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"California's Wildfires Have Become Bigger, Deadlier, and More Costly. Here's Why"

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"California's Wildfires Have Become Bigger, Deadlier, and More Costly. Here's Why"

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California Wildfires Astonishing Aerial Footage From Space | TIME

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What's causing the devastating California wildfires?

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All the latest content about California wildfires from the BBC.

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In the months after my neighborhood burned, I waited fearfully, which means I waited angrily. In particular, I hoped power companies would put their lines underground. In 1995, fire-related costs ate up 16 percent of the U.S. Forest Service budget. By 2015, half of the budget was devoted to fire. Some of us wondered how safe our power can be when utility-company profits drive power operations. PG&E has been found guilty of negligence before in wildfires, and some of us point at negligence and greed again this time.

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In California, this is a familiar story. Three years ago, in February of 2015, one-third of the houses in my remote neighborhood in Eastern California burned down. Here, before the fire, 100 houses lay scattered across the leeward flank of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The people who live here spend their time walking steep roads, listening to crickets, chasing mule deer out of the garden, and looking over a desert valley below. Days after the fire, my neighbor, Cassie, wasn’t doing any of these things. Instead, she stood inside her smoking foundation. Tall and easygoing with freckles on her nose, Cassie had come home from college that winter to sift rubble with her mom and dad. Under different circumstances, we might have hiked together or skated frozen ponds. I used to carpool with her family to school, and I remember her house, wooden and gorgeous and overlooking a ravine from which flames later rose.

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In California, this is a familiar story. Three years ago, in February of 2015, one-third of the houses in my remote neighborhood in Eastern California burned down. Here, before the fire, 100 houses lay scattered across the leeward flank of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The people who live here spend their time walking steep roads, listening to crickets, chasing mule deer out of the garden, and looking over a desert valley below. Days after the fire, my neighbor, Cassie, wasn’t doing any of these things. Instead, she stood inside her smoking foundation. Tall and easygoing with freckles on her nose, Cassie had come home from college that winter to sift rubble with her mom and dad. Under different circumstances, we might have hiked together or skated frozen ponds. I used to carpool with her family to school, and I remember her house, wooden and gorgeous and overlooking a ravine from which flames later rose.

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Over 600 missing in California fires (official statement)

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"California's "Camp Fire" death toll jumps to 48 as thousands of firefighters battle blazes"

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"California's "Camp Fire" death toll jumps to 48 as thousands of firefighters battle blazes"

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The Camp Fire is generally referred to as a forest fire or, to use the term preferred by firefighting professionals, a wildfire. As the name suggests, wildfires are mostly natural phenomena—even when initially triggered by humans—moving through grasslands, scrub, and forest, consuming the biomass in their paths, especially litter and deadwood. Visiting the disaster area, President Donald Trump blamed poor forestry practices and suggested California’s forests should be managed more like Finland’s where they spend “a lot of time on raking and cleaning.”

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The Camp Fire is generally referred to as a forest fire or, to use the term preferred by firefighting professionals, a wildfire. As the name suggests, wildfires are mostly natural phenomena—even when initially triggered by humans—moving through grasslands, scrub, and forest, consuming the biomass in their paths, especially litter and deadwood. Visiting the disaster area, President Donald Trump blamed poor forestry practices and suggested California’s forests should be managed more like Finland’s where they spend “a lot of time on raking and cleaning.”

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California wildfires driven by weather and climate conditions

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It’s hard to look at the images of what used to be Paradise. On Nov. 8, California’s Camp Fire tore through the Sierra Nevada foothills town of 27,000 people with little advance warning. It destroyed homes, incinerated cars—many of which were abandoned on roads that had became gridlocked by fleeing residents—and left a death toll of 77 people and climbing. Nearly 1,000 remain unaccounted for. But if you look closely at photos and video of the aftermath, you’ll notice something surprising. The buildings are gone, but most of the trees are still standing—many with their leaves or needles intact.

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It’s hard to look at the images of what used to be Paradise. On Nov. 8, California’s Camp Fire tore through the Sierra Nevada foothills town of 27,000 people with little advance warning. It destroyed homes, incinerated cars—many of which were abandoned on roads that had became gridlocked by fleeing residents—and left a death toll of 77 people and climbing. Nearly 1,000 remain unaccounted for. But if you look closely at photos and video of the aftermath, you’ll notice something surprising. The buildings are gone, but most of the trees are still standing—many with their leaves or needles intact.

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It’s hard to look at the images of what used to be Paradise. On Nov. 8, California’s Camp Fire tore through the Sierra Nevada foothills town of 27,000 people with little advance warning. It destroyed homes, incinerated cars—many of which were abandoned on roads that had became gridlocked by fleeing residents—and left a death toll of 77 people and climbing. Nearly 1,000 remain unaccounted for. But if you look closely at photos and video of the aftermath, you’ll notice something surprising. The buildings are gone, but most of the trees are still standing—many with their leaves or needles intact.

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Southern California wildfires encroach upon homes, businesse

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"Homeowner’s claim on PG&E work raises questions on Camp Fire’s origin"

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"Homeowner’s claim on PG&E work raises questions on Camp Fire’s origin"

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Donald Trump's Awful Response to California Wildfires

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The common factor is climate change, he added.A California report projects that, if greenhouse gas emissions and global temperatures continue to rise, by the end of the century extreme wildfires that burn more than 10,000 hectares could increase by nearly 50 percent, and the average area burned could increase by 77 percent. Westerling contributed to the report, which was released in August.Balch added that the wildfire threat is complicated by shifts in population. She said 1.8 million homes in the Western United States are at high fire risk.She said homeowners and communities need to be proactive in clearing flammable brush, but that the growing fire risk requires action on many fronts, from slowing climate change to reducing the risk of wildfires getting started.

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The common factor is climate change, he added.A California report projects that, if greenhouse gas emissions and global temperatures continue to rise, by the end of the century extreme wildfires that burn more than 10,000 hectares could increase by nearly 50 percent, and the average area burned could increase by 77 percent. Westerling contributed to the report, which was released in August.Balch added that the wildfire threat is complicated by shifts in population. She said 1.8 million homes in the Western United States are at high fire risk.She said homeowners and communities need to be proactive in clearing flammable brush, but that the growing fire risk requires action on many fronts, from slowing climate change to reducing the risk of wildfires getting started.

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"FIRES OF HELL California wildfires mapped – what’s caused the fires and why has the 2018 season been so destructive?"

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"FIRES OF HELL California wildfires mapped – what’s caused the fires and why has the 2018 season been so destructive?"

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Deadly fires not forest firesWesterling said forest management, cited by President Donald Trump as a factor in these fires, is important in reducing the intensity of some fires and maintaining the carbon balance in the atmosphere — a vital role of forests — but that the deadly fires started on private lands in the Los Angeles suburbs and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and not in forests.“It is true that in some places, in some fires, that legacy of how we managed past fires can make a big difference in fire severity,” Westerling said. “But we’re seeing fires increase in size and intensity all over the map in very different types of vegetation.”

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Deadly fires not forest firesWesterling said forest management, cited by President Donald Trump as a factor in these fires, is important in reducing the intensity of some fires and maintaining the carbon balance in the atmosphere — a vital role of forests — but that the deadly fires started on private lands in the Los Angeles suburbs and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and not in forests.“It is true that in some places, in some fires, that legacy of how we managed past fires can make a big difference in fire severity,” Westerling said. “But we’re seeing fires increase in size and intensity all over the map in very different types of vegetation.”

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What's causing the devastating California wildfires?

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"The Simple Reason That Humans Can’t Control Wildfires"

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"The Simple Reason That Humans Can’t Control Wildfires"

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"The Manmade Causes Of California's Endless Fire Season"

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"The Manmade Causes Of California's Endless Fire Season"

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"California wildfires leave at least 74 dead with more than 1,000 still missing: 'It's going to get worse'"

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"California wildfires leave at least 74 dead with more than 1,000 still missing: 'It's going to get worse'"

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"The California Wildfires: Possible Causes And Current Status"

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"The California Wildfires: Possible Causes And Current Status"

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Camp Fire

Location: Butte County

151,272 acres burned

70 percent contained

79 fatalities confirmed

699 unaccounted for

15,573 structures destroyed (11,713 residences, 472 commercial and 3,388 other buildings)

Full containment expected Nov. 30

Woolsey Fire

Location: Los Angeles County, Ventura County

96,949 acres burned

94 percent contained

3 fatalities confirmed

1,500 structures destroyed, 341 damaged

Full containment expected Nov. 22

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"Humans Cause Over 95 Percent of California Wildfires"

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"Humans Cause Over 95 Percent of California Wildfires"

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While the Woolsey Fire burning in Southern California has been 98 percent contained as of Tuesday night, it's left a huge mark on the landscape.

According to the state's fire services, the wildfire has burned almost 97,000 acres, an area so vast you can see it from space.

SEE ALSO: Before and after photos show the devastation of the California wildfires

NASA shared an image of the "burn scar" taken on Nov. 18 using the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) that sits on on the space agency’s Terra satellite.

Burned vegetation in the area appears brown, while green indicates unburned vegetation. Buildings and roads are light gray and white. According to NASA, the colors have been altered to look more natural.

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Jake paul's house burns down from the wildfire in California.

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Gerard Butler Hosts Star-Studded Fundraiser for California Fire Relief After His Home Was Damaged

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"California fires: What started the California fires 2018? Has cause of fire been REVEALED?"

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"California fires: What started the California fires 2018? Has cause of fire been REVEALED?"

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"How do wildfires start? All it takes is a spark"

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"How do wildfires start? All it takes is a spark"

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California wildfires death toll climbs to 84, with more than 800 still unaccounted for

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California wildfires death toll climbs to 84, with more than 800 still unaccounted for

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According to abc news, death to 84 people caused by a camp fire. There are still 800 people unaccounted for.  This fire making it the most deadliest and destructive fire  in the state's history.

President Donald Trump arrives at California to investigate and tour the damage to the country.

Donald Trump said "He's never seen anything  like this in California"

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Potential causes behind wildfiresShifting population means more chances for ignitions, with “people moving into flammable places and literally building homes in the line of fire,” Balch said.She said humans cause 84 percent of wildfires, and lightning causes the rest.Malfunctioning equipment and downed power lines are behind many blazes, and authorities are trying to learn if equipment failures by utility companies sparked the two large California blazes.Careless campers are responsible for some fires, Balch said, and the most dangerous day for fires in the United States is Independence Day, the Fourth of July, when fireworks spark both structural and wildfires.

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Potential causes behind wildfiresShifting population means more chances for ignitions, with “people moving into flammable places and literally building homes in the line of fire,” Balch said.She said humans cause 84 percent of wildfires, and lightning causes the rest.Malfunctioning equipment and downed power lines are behind many blazes, and authorities are trying to learn if equipment failures by utility companies sparked the two large California blazes.Careless campers are responsible for some fires, Balch said, and the most dangerous day for fires in the United States is Independence Day, the Fourth of July, when fireworks spark both structural and wildfires.

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Hundreds forced to Flee California Wildfires

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Hundreds forced to Flee California Wildfires

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The Camp Fire, which decimated Paradise, has already burned about 117,000 acres and is only about 30 percent contained

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The cause of all three fires, Camp Fire, Woolsey Fire and Hills Fire remains unknown as yet.

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"Why the wildfire in Northern California was so severe"

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"Why the wildfire in Northern California was so severe"

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he Camp Fire that began two weeks ago has scorched an area roughly the size of Chicago, burned down more than 13,000 homes and killed at least 81 people, with the number increasing daily. Hundreds of people are unaccounted for — a list that's constantly changing and has spread confusion about the ultimate number of victims.

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Part 2

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very dangerous fire in california where jake paul lives.

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"How did California's wildfires start? Two utility companies face scrutiny"

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How did California's wildfires start? Two utility companies face scrutiny

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Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison face scrutiny after being found responsible for earlier fires

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"What Started the California Fires? Experts Track the Blazes’ Origins"

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In searching for the cause of the wildfire, investigators will look at things that were touched by the flames but not destroyed. Credit Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times

PARADISE, Calif. - One huge fire was caused by a spark set off by a man with a hammer, working on a fence post in a field of dry vegetation. Another began at a backyard barbecue. A 2007 fire on Santa Catalina Island was ignited by workers cutting metal wires with a torch.

As investigators try to determine what started the most devastating wildfire in California history, which killed at least 56 people, the beginning premise is that human beings - through their mistakes, or their toys, tools and technologies - were probably behind it.

But looking into the cause of a fire, which can take months of painstaking work, also means rolling back the clock to a moment and to a spot that, like most of the town of Paradise, has been reduced to ash. What was there at the moment of the fire's birth was probably destroyed by the fire itself, or at least profoundly altered.

Even a tiny pebble can be an important clue. On which side was it blackened by heat? What's the condition of the soil below the fire at the place it started? An electrical charge from a high-voltage power line, for example, can solidify sand with a telltale signature. Then investigators look at things that were touched by the flames but not destroyed.

"If you're looking at some trees, you look at the angle of char, the way that the needles froze in the heat; then you can say, 'This fire spread from right to left,'" said James Engel, the deputy chief of law enforcement and fire prevention at the northern division of California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, better known as Cal Fire.

The so-called Camp Fire, which, in addition to its death toll, destroyed more than 10,000 homes and businesses, began on a day of low humidity, strong winds and lingering drought, with soils and plants in some areas parched by more than 200 days with no significant precipitation. That was the environment in which the fire began - itself a crucial piece of the puzzle.

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As investigators continue to search the devastation for remains, another group will begin sifting the ashes looking for a cause of the wildfire. Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times

An electrical cause is certainly on the table, Mr. Engel said, from a power line that could have fallen in the wind, or some other malfunctioning electrical equipment.
[A 'perfectly imperfect' life: The victims of the California wildfires.]
Other causes will also be considered, from a tossed cigarette to a power-mower blade sparking a rock to a hot vehicle tailpipe. Many investors in Pacific Gas and Electric, one of California's largest utility companies, have already placed their bets and reduced their risk, with the company's share price plummeting in a wave of selling in fear that the company will be held liable.

The utility was responsible for several of last year's wildfires that burned through Northern California's wine country. In fact, Cal Fire has determined that of the 21 major fires last fall in Northern California, at least 17 were caused by power lines, poles and other equipment owned by Pacific Gas and Electric Company.

Earlier this year, the utility said that it would begin pre-emptively turning off the power to some customers to avoid causing wildfires under certain conditions.

Cal Fire, once it determines a cause, can seek compensation for firefighting costs - which in the case of the Camp Fire will be staggering, whoever foots the bill. More than 5,600 firefighters were still on the lines on Wednesday, with 23 helicopters in the air and 630 fire engines were on the ground. The fire has burned 138,000 acres and was 35 percent contained.

Whatever triggered the blaze - which was first reported early Thursday, just east of Paradise, a town of about 27,000 people in the Sierra Nevada foothills - strong winds roaring through the dry terrain were the reason it spread so quickly and caused so much devastation.

A changing climate is potentially part of the Camp Fire's story, in deepening patterns of drought in California. Some researchers said that logging in the burned area after a fire in 2008, which was intended to clear out fuels and make this part of Northern California safer, may have had the opposite result. The logging may have left fast-burning weeds and young trees in the fire's path.

"When it got to the logged area, it spread very rapidly and people just didn't have much time to evacuate in Paradise, so this whole notion that logging - so-called hazardous fuels reduction - was going to save the town is a dangerous falsehood," said Chad Hanson, a fire ecologist at the John Muir Project, an environmental group that has been critical of land-management policies and logging practices on public lands. The speed at which the fire spread has raised concerns about the nearly 100 people who are still missing.

Investigators looking into the cause of the wildfire will try to roll back the clock to a moment and to a spot that, like most of the town of Paradise, has been reduced to ash. Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times

For the team of 10 investigators from Cal Fire that has begun its work, old-fashioned shoe-leather will be the start. They plan to interview as many witnesses as possible, and Mr. Engel said he starts every day looking in the news media for the names of displaced fire survivors.

In the age of the cellphone, another important investigative tool will be video. Many people turned on their phone cameras as they were escaping or as the fire was approaching their homes, and posted the video to social media. Investigators will be searching for the video, hoping to create a kind of composite from multiple sources, showing how the fire spread and which way smoke was moving at any given moment.

The investigation of the Camp Fire will not end with the state's inquiry. Private investigators, especially from insurance companies, will eventually arrive, though Cal Fire's work comes first. If criminal charges become part of the picture, prosecutors from Butte County or other jurisdictions also would be brought in.

Mr. Engel, the state fire official, said that investigators do not typically focus on the broader issues of land management or climate science: how and when trees were cut for timber, for example, or patterns of drought.

Those things could be important in a fire's total impact, he said, and on the potential for more fires. But determining the cause of a fire is like taking a short story that is complete except for its first sentence, and then writing a beginning that explains how and what happened.

That sentence often starts with something about the weather. "Temperature, wind and humidity; those are the things that affect ignitions," Mr. Engel said. After that, human variables are almost always in play.

Researchers have shown, for example, that when people take their guns out into the woods for target practice, some kinds of ammunition are more likely to start a fire than others.

"As a fire flows, it hits objects that it consumes, or may not consume, and it leaves indicators on those objects," Mr. Engel said. "That's where we start reading."

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The California Wildfires: How Experts Track a Blaze to Its Origin

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PARADISE, Calif. - One huge fire was caused by a spark set off by a man with a hammer, working on a fence post in a field of dry vegetation. Another began at a backyard barbecue. A 2007 fire on Santa Catalina Island was ignited by workers cutting metal wires with a torch.

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Nov. 15, 2018

PARADISE, Calif. — One huge fire was caused by a spark set off by a man with a hammer, working on a fence post in a field of dry vegetation. Another began at a backyard barbecue. A 2007 fire on Santa Catalina Island was ignited by workers cutting metal wires with a torch.

As investigators try to determine what started the most devastating wildfire in California history, which has killed at least 63 people, the beginning premise is that human beings — through their mistakes, or their toys, tools and technologies — were probably behind it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/us/camp-fire-paradise-cause.html

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https://www.voanews.com/a/experts-blame-multiple-causes-for-california-fires/4661305.html

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The Camp Fire, which decimated Paradise, has already burned about 117,000 acres and is only about 30 percent contained

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Hundreds of people remain missing in the wake of a pair of ferocious wildfires that have been blazing across both ends of California.

Interested in California Wildfires?

Add California Wildfires as an interest to stay up to date on the latest California Wildfires news, video, and analysis from ABC News.

The two monstrous blazes, which both ignited earlier this month, have claimed a total of 84 lives while laying waste to a total area of nearly 400 square miles, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Officials said that at least 64 of the remains have been positively identified so far.

The vast majority of the deaths -- 81 total -- were due to the Camp Fire in Northern California's Butte County, making it the deadliest and most destructive wildland fire in the state's history.

The number of people missing or unaccounted for in Butte County was up to 1,202 on Sunday but decreased to 699 on Monday night as the list of accounted individuals increased, according to Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea. The number spiked back to 870 unaccounted for on Tuesday evening.

President Donald Trump arrived in California on Saturday to survey the devastation and meet with firefighters, alongside California Gov. Jerry Brown and the state's governor-elect, Gavin Newsom.

The president stopped first in the town of Paradise, where he called the damage "total devastation."

"We've never seen anything like this in California," Trump said.

The president later visited Malibu to tour devastation from the Woolsey Fire.

Meanwhile, the smoke from the flames has descended across the Golden State and choked the air in major cities, including San Francisco. Officials have advised residents in the affected areas to remain indoors and wear a protective mask outside.

The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning for California over the past weekend as humidity dropped and wind gusts were forecast to get up to 40 mph in the Camp Fire zone.

Much-needed rain is expected to finally arrive in the area on Wednesday morning. However, even though that will happen fire fighting in the state, there is the potential for mudslides in burn scar areas.

The Camp Fire in Northern California

The Camp Fire ignited Nov. 8 near Pulga, a tiny community in Butte County nestled in the Plumas National Forest. The blaze exploded as strong winds fanned the flames southwest, enveloping Paradise, a bucolic community of 27,000 people in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

The fire has virtually decimated the entire town.

Melissa Schuster, a Paradise town council member, said her house was among those leveled by the Camp Fire.

"Our entire five-member council is homeless," Schuster said in a Nov. 13 interview on ABC News' "Start Here" podcast. "All of our houses have been destroyed."

The death toll from the Camp Fire increased to 81 on Tuesday, after officials found still more bodies in the burned-out rubble of homes and melted cars, according to the Butte County sheriff, who has warned that the remains of some of the missing may never be recovered due to the severity of the fire.

Thom Porter, chief of strategic planning for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said the body count is expected to climb higher as search crews continue sifting through the destruction.

"It is by far the most deadly single fire in California history and it's going to get worse, unfortunately," Porter said of the Camp Fire.

Many of the deaths have taken place in Paradise.

"The entire community of Paradise is a toxic wasteland right now," Schuster said, holding back tears. "In addition to that, and this is the hardest part for me to even talk about, the number of fatalities is [among] things that we don't know at this moment and that's something that has to be determined before people can move back in."

The Camp Fire, which has scorched a total of 152,250 acres in Butte County, was 75 percent contained Tuesday night as thousands of exhausted firefighters work around the clock to quell the inferno, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Nearly 17,000 structures have been destroyed by the blaze.

Two prison inmate firefighters were among a total of three firefighters who have been injured while battling the Camp Fire, officials told ABC News.

Last week, Gov. Brown toured the devastation caused by the Camp Fire along with Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), as well as U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke.

"This is one of the worst disasters I've ever seen in my career, hands down," Long told reporters at the scene Nov. 14.

The Woolsey Fire in Southern California

The Woolsey Fire also ignited Nov. 8 near the city of Simi Valley in Ventura County and rapidly spread south to Los Angeles County. The wind-driven flames jumped the 101 Freeway before sweeping through the celebrity enclaves of Malibu and Calabasas.

The entire city of Malibu and a sprawling naval base near the seaside city of Oxnard were among the areas under mandatory evacuation orders, as officials warned the blaze could potentially spread all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

Evacuation orders have since been lifted for some areas, including parts of Malibu, as firefighters successfully stretch containment levels.

The Woolsey Fire, which has torched a total of 96,949 acres in Ventura and Los Angeles counties, was up to 98 percent containment by Tuesday night, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as Cal Fire.

In all, 1,500 structures have been destroyed and another 341 have been damaged, as of Tuesday morning.

The blaze burned down a portion of Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills known as "Western Town," where hundreds of movies and television shows, including HBO's "Westworld," have been filmed, dating back to the 1920s.

The Woolsey Fire has been blamed for the deaths of at least three people, and three firefighters sustained injuries while battling the flames, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

A public health emergency

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has declared a public health emergency in California, where the wildfires have forced the evacuation of at least two hospitals and eight other health facilities.

"We are working closely with state health authorities and monitoring the needs of healthcare facilities to provide whatever they may need to save lives and protect health," Azar said in a Nov. 14 statement. "This declaration will help ensure that Americans who are threatened by these dangerous wildfires and who rely on Medicare, Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program have continuous access to the care they need."

Smoke advisories have been issued for the affected region amid concerns that smoke from the fires could present a "significant health threat" for people with asthma and other lung conditions, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Residents have been urged to stay indoors as much as possible and to wear a properly fitting mask when venturing outside.

Berkeley Earth, a California-based nonprofit that analyzes air quality in real-time, ranked San Francisco, Stockton and Sacramento as the world's three "most polluted cities" last Friday morning.

National Weather Service meteorologist Aviva Braun told reporters that light winds have contributed to the poor air quality but, on Saturday, stronger northeast winds mixing in the valley were expected to help improve conditions.

Meanwhile, there has been an outbreak of norovirus at a shelter in Butte County housing evacuees, according to Lisa Almaguer, public information officer for Butte County Public Health.

People who are ill at the shelter have been taken to a separate location, are using separate restroom facilities and are being cared for by public health experts, according to Almaguer, who said the presence of the contagious virus is "not uncommon," especially at this time of year and "with hundreds of people living in close quarters."

ABC News' Karine Hafuta, Marilyn Heck and Bonnie McLean contributed to this report

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california department of forestry and fire protection

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Relentless California wildfires leave 84 dead, over 800 unaccounted for

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Hundreds of people remain missing in the wake of a pair of ferocious wildfires that have been blazing across both ends of California. Add California Wildfires as an interest to stay up to date on the latest California Wildfires news, video, and analysis from ABC News.

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Wild Fire Becomes deadliest in California

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Wild Fire Becomes deadliest in California

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According to the news producer New York Times. On November 9th 2018, at least 44 people died and more than 200 missing caused by the spreading of a wildfire in California. Tens of thousands of people were forced to evacuate. There major fire ranges in California are Los Angeles  and San Francisco. These wild fires have been caused by camp fires, hill fires and the woolsey fire.

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Wildfire

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As counties across California continue to be devastated by wildfires, the Camp Fire has become the most destructive in the state's history based on the number of structures destroyed.

Burning in Butte County, the Camp Fire has destroyed more than 16,000 structures, most of them homes. The fire is also the deadliest in state history.

PHOTOS: Camp Fire burns through Butte County, California

The list of the 10 most destructive wildfires in California history has seen several recent updates. Last October's North Bay fires caused unprecedented damage, with the Tubbs Fire ranking as one of the most destructive ever.

Here are the most destructive fires in California history based on number of structures damaged:

1. CAMP FIRE - (Butte County), November 2018
Structures destroyed: 16,838
Acres burned: 152,250
Deaths: 81
NOTE: Figures accurate as of Nov. 20

2. TUBBS FIRE - (Sonoma County), October 2017
Structures destroyed: 5,636
Acres burned: 36,807
Deaths: 22

3. TUNNEL FIRE - Oakland Hills (Alameda County), October 1991
Structures destroyed: 2,900
Acres burned: 1,600
Deaths: 25

4. CEDAR FIRE (San Diego County), October 2003
Structures destroyed: 2,820
Acres burned: 273,246
Deaths: 15

5. VALLEY FIRE (Lake, Napa & Sonoma County), September 2015

Structures destroyed: 1,955
Acres burned: 76,067
Deaths: 4

6. WITCH FIRE (San Diego County), October 2007
Structures destroyed: 1,650
Acres burned: 197,990
Deaths: 2

7. CARR FIRE (Shasta County, Trinity County), July 2018
Structures destroyed: 1,604
Acres burned: 229,651
Deaths: 7

8. NUNS FIRE (Sonoma County), October 2017
Structures destroyed: 1,355
Acres burned: 54,382
Deaths: 3

9. THOMAS FIRE (Ventura County, Santa Barbara), December 2017
Structures destroyed: 1,063

Acres burned: 281,893
Deaths: 1

10. OLD FIRE (San Bernardino County), October 2003
Structures destroyed: 1,003
Acres burned: 91,281
Deaths: 6
RELATED: November 2018 California wildfires coverage

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Camp Fire is California's most destructive wildfire

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As counties across California continue to be devastated by wildfires, the Camp Fire has become the most destructive in the state's history based on the number of structures destroyed. Burning in Butte County, the Camp Fire has destroyed more than 16,000 structures, most of them homes.

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"Power Lines Are Burning the West"

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Human technology is responsible for more loss from fire than any other cause. But reducing fire's impact will require changes to how people live, not just to the infrastructure that lets them do so.

Mike Blake / Reuters

In October 2017, 250 square miles burned in Northern California, destroying 6,000 homes and businesses and killing 44 people. For now, the cause of these fires has not been determined. The private utility company Pacific Gas and Electric, known to Californians as PG&E, is under investigation. Total damage for the Northern California wildfires comes to $9 billion. PG&E has started stockpiling cash.

In California, this is a familiar story. Three years ago, in February of 2015, one-third of the houses in my remote neighborhood in Eastern California burned down. Here, before the fire, 100 houses lay scattered across the leeward flank of the Sierra Nevada mountains. The people who live here spend their time walking steep roads, listening to crickets, chasing mule deer out of the garden, and looking over a desert valley below. Days after the fire, my neighbor, Cassie, wasn't doing any of these things. Instead, she stood inside her smoking foundation. Tall and easygoing with freckles on her nose, Cassie had come home from college that winter to sift rubble with her mom and dad. Under different circumstances, we might have hiked together or skated frozen ponds. I used to carpool with her family to school, and I remember her house, wooden and gorgeous and overlooking a ravine from which flames later rose.

We wore rubber gloves to sort the rubble, but there was not much rubble to sort. The air smelled of sulfur, and mostly only dust lingered, as if a great storm had picked up the walls and roof and furniture and lifted everything away.

Like the 2017 fires in Northern California, the cause of the fire that burned our neighborhood, according to the government database, is still under investigation. One source is more likely than others: On that day, strong winds whipped power lines that hung over dry brush.

A power line can start a fire if it breaks in the wind. It can start a fire when a tree or a branch falls across it, or when lines slap together, or when equipment gets old and fails without anyone noticing. In 2015, fires started by electrical lines and equipment burned more acres in California than any other cause. Power lines sparked fires that set records in New Mexico and fed a blaze in Great Smoky Mountains National Park that entered the city of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and killed 14 people in 2016. In recent years, they have consistently been among the three major causes of California wildfires.

Hurricane-force winds periodically shriek off the Pacific and rattle California. Wind strong enough to break a power line spreads fire fast. This past October, when I sniffed the air and found that California was once again burning, I looked around and saw many wires thatching an orange sky. I was visiting my aunt in Northern California, 50 miles from the fires. We sat inside and watched the noon sun dim.

My childhood home didn't burn the year Cassie's did. But it should have. Dry leaves lay in piles beside the wooden walls. The volunteer fire captain's house across the street burned, although he maintained plenty of defensible space. And so I wait, even now, for the next windstorm.

In the months after my neighborhood burned, I waited fearfully, which means I waited angrily. In particular, I hoped power companies would put their lines underground. In 1995, fire-related costs ate up 16 percent of the U.S. Forest Service budget. By 2015, half of the budget was devoted to fire. Some of us wondered how safe our power can be when utility-company profits drive power operations. PG&E has been found guilty of negligence before in wildfires, and some of us point at negligence and greed again this time.

There's a precedent for fire occurring alongside an infrastructure that drives economic growth. From 1870 until the 1920s, most major fires in America were caused by locomotives. We fixed that problem, says Stephen Pyne, a firefighter-turned-historian. "New laws were enforced, fines and lawsuits applied economic pressure, engines were compelled to replace coal with oil as fuel, suitable spark arrestors were invented, rights-of-way were cleaned of debris, lines were patrolled." And so locomotives started wildfires for decades, but not forever.

Like railroads, power lines deliver a seemingly limitless supply of a product wherever people want it. On a good day, the grid makes life easy. Far from urban centers, in my house up the side of a mountain, in an ocean of dry brush, the lights still flick on.

In general, power lines only cause fire when things go wrong above ground. Even utility companies agree, after a 2012 study by the Edison Electric Institute revealed that underground lines had fewer problems during storms and were better for public safety all around. But California has 210,000 miles of electrical lines. The cost to put lines underground is about $1 million per mile to start, and much more in mountainous areas. That's five to 10 times what it costs to hang a line overhead, which usually makes underground lines logistically or economically impractical. In North Carolina, for example, a plan to put power lines underground was dropped because utility rates in the impacted area would have risen by 125 percent.

And despite the impulse to blame industry, the power companies aren't entirely in control of the solution. California utility companies don't get to decide how much line they install underground; that matter is regulated by the Public Utilities Commission, in order to "protect consumers," "safeguard the environment," and "assure Californians' access to safe and reliable utility infrastructure," according to the organization's stated mission. The commission balances risk with cost and limits how much utility companies can spend by putting wires underground. Other improvements to the grid are being investigated, including better line insulation and technology that could anticipate line failure and shut off power in advance. But all of these solutions will be slow and costly to implement. I might get angry with utility companies, but I like to turn lights on in the dark.

In the United States, fossil fuels burned to make electricity and heat put more greenhouse-gas emissions into the atmosphere than any industry. My neighbors' houses burned amid the worst drought California had seen in a millennium. In recent decades, wildfires in the American West have begun to range farther and burn longer. Scientists from eight universities got together in 2016 and looked at tendencies in wildfire and the ways we manage wildfire. They concluded that "wildfires across western North America have increased in number and size over the past three decades, and this trend will continue in response to further warming." They called this a "new era."

Fires burn bigger areas and destroy three times as many houses as they used to. What was once a problem in June, July, and August now extends through November and beyond. I evacuated for avalanche warnings in the winters of my childhood. In February 2015, I wandered my neighborhood and gaped at new patches of sky, as smoke seeped out of the ground.

When a fire comes up the side of the mountain and destroys our homes, we say: natural disaster. When lightning starts that fire, we say: natural disaster. When power lines start that fire, we still say: natural disaster. Deliberate debris burning, fireworks, and rogue campfires are among the most common causes of so-called wildfire in some parts of California. Still, when people consider wildfire-even wildfire caused by human tools-it seems to us as inescapable as lightning.

Three years after her house burned down, I asked my childhood neighbor Cassie whether she felt the fire that destroyed her house was inevitable. She lives in San Francisco now, where she prepares environmental impact reports for federal and state agencies. Her parents live in a house rebuilt atop the ashes of the old. "The smell of smoke made me nauseous," Cassie told me, while Napa and Sonoma burned last fall. "I woke up in the middle of the night because I could smell it. It felt so close."

Cassie did not consider the loss of her home unavoidable. When people treat fire as an inevitability, she said, its consequences become divorced from human behavior. What she saw on the local news after the Northern California fires were the stories of "people and families and homes," over and over. It makes sense, because people's lives are changed, she said. "But that's always the focus, instead of the bigger issue ... instead of, this could have been prevented, and there's a reason that it happened, and it's connected to our infrastructure. But I just don't think it's something people want to talk about." It sickened her, to feel fire's heat, to smell its smoke, without facing its implications.

And those implications are complicated. "Many of the problems of fire management do not have technical fixes," Pyne, the fire historian, wrote during the Northern California fires. "They depend on social choices hammered out in politics-appropriate land use, the purpose of public lands, competing economic interests, cultural values, and philosophies."

It's possible to update technology to dodge disaster, to a point. We can make advance warning systems for earthquakes, cloak first responders in NASA-developed fire suits, and mitigate rising sea levels with permeable pavement and rain gardens. We can also update technology to avoid having to change the assumptions that cause some of the problems in the first place. When locomotives burned forests, people changed the mechanics of trains-they didn't reevaluate the long-term viability of rail. The need to move thousands of tons of lumber and coal and food and passengers at high speeds through forest and prairie and desert did not come into question. It's easier to find a quick fix than it is to change culture.

Some biologists contend that our brains did not evolve to conceive of the long-term consequences of our choices; that we are not primed to master deep time but to put out small fires⁠, if you will. Yet it appears we have also evolved to comprehend the far future, if only in flashes. We operate, Pyne writes, "not according to strict evolutionary selection but in the realm of culture, which is to say, of choice and confusion."

The night our neighborhood went up in smoke, I was 2,000 miles away. I sat on the floor and held a phone to my ear while my father described our mountain, burning. I gathered the things I had taken from my childhood bedroom around me like talismans and I imagined the world in flames.

My house survived the fire because the volunteer fire captain, who drove up his street in a fire truck and saw his own house burning, had the presence of mind to keep moving, to keep working to save what remained. He or another volunteer doused the flames that devoured a pile of railroad ties in our yard, flames that could have laddered up our brush hill and laced fingers through the railings of the porch.

Eventually, the scientists say, wildfires in the western United States might dwindle. This could happen when precipitation withers to the point that vegetation doesn't come back. The fires will end when there is nothing more to burn. Cassie and I would like to choose a world in which there is a lot left to lose-we would prefer to protect our mountain homes, not to mention our larger communities and the global climate, and direct our lives in ways that will save what we love. Others would, too. Last October somebody put up signs in Sonoma that said, "The Love in the Air Is Thicker Than the Smoke."

For those of us living in the path of wildfire, we have come to understand that we must live with it, that no quick solution awaits us, that changing the ways we think and being open to new ways of living might protect our communities. Pyne writes that fire as we know it is "largely the outcome of what this creature has done, and not done." Humans have changed fire, and fire will change us, one way or another. We can try to choose the way. Maybe this means smarter technology, already in the works. Maybe it means making new relationships with fire, making fire a tool, listening to the people who understand fire when it's time to rebuild and then rebuilding in different ways, or even in different places.

The scientists say we can choose to accept wildfire as "as an inevitable catalyst of change," and we can adapt. Here, in a nation that currently suppresses 95 percent of all wildfires, at great cost and with questionable efficacy, it might be best to focus more on guiding the way fire burns. Communities can put more resources into controlled burns-more than 99 percent of which stay within selected boundaries-and teach the public about their benefit. Local governments can help educate and support landowners in fuel removal and property protection. And both residents and developers can think carefully before they build farther into wilderness, which is, after all, fire's country.

And yet it's hard to work to change more than the technology-to change ourselves in order to accommodate and support these adaptations. It's easy instead to slip back into life as we know it, to forget what a new era may ask of us, even when the stakes are very high. "Despite the fact that I feel very passionately about a lot of these issues, and they impact me personally, I don't think about it day to day," Cassie said. "At all. Ever." And neither do I. This is life, the slow build of the wind on the Pacific, the heave of power over our heads.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Kendra Atleework is a writer based in Minneapolis and Bishop, California. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Pinch, and Best American Essays 2015.

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Human technology is responsible for more loss from fire than any other cause. But reducing fire's impact will require changes to how people live, not just to the infrastructure that lets them do so. In October 2017, 250 square miles burned in Northern California, destroying 6,000 homes and businesses and killing 44 people.