Search on for 1,276 missing after Calif’s deadliest wildfire

PARADISE, November 18 

The number of people missing after California’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire jumped on Saturday to 1,276, despite authorities locating hundreds of people who scattered when the Camp Fire tore through the mountain town of Paradise.

Forensic recovery teams sifting through the charred wreckage recovered the remains of five more victims, bringing the death toll to at least 76, authorities said. Sixty-three of them have been tentatively identified, pending DNA confirmation.

Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said much of the increase in the number of missing was due to his office’s efforts to comb through a backlog of emergency calls that came in during the first hours of the fire on November 8.

He said officials were sifting through the list of missing persons for duplications and people who fled. Some 380 people had been located and taken off the list since Friday, he said.

The sheriff spoke after President Donald Trump visited Paradise, the small community that was home to nearly 27,000 people in the Sierra foothills, 280 km north of San Francisco, before being all but consumed by the blaze.

“Nobody could have thought this would ever happen,” Trump told reporters amid the charred wreckage of the town’s Skyway Villa Mobile Home and RV Park.

The disaster already ranks among the deadliest US wildfires since the turn of the last century. Eighty-seven persons perished in the Big Burn firestorm that swept the  Rockies in August 1910. — Reuters