The great fires which hit the west coast of the United States continue to advance burning entire neighborhoods of cities and forcing the evacuation of homes in California, Oregon and Washington state: seven people died from the fires on Thursday. The most affected state continues to be California, where hundreds of fires have also broken out in the northern and central parts of the state, in Fresno, in the Los Angeles area and in Silicon Valley.
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The situation it is also particularly critical in the southern suburbs of Portland, in Oregon, where in the night between Thursday and Friday the more than 400,000 inhabitants of Clackamas County were placed on alert and more than half were forced to evacuate their homes. Hundreds of homes have already been burned in Oregon and another 400 are in danger. One of the major fires, the “Almeda Fire”, hit Phoenix and Talent earlier this week, in southern Oregon, and forced further evacuations Wednesday also in the city of Medford, which is the eighth largest city in Oregon with about 80,000 inhabitants.
Short video of what our deputies were seeing out there last night. Very scary and very real. ???? for all those effected. This vid was taken HWY 224/Faraday pic.twitter.com/ZFnC7UxxhD
— Lt. Brian Jensen (@LtBJensen) September 10, 2020
For the “Almeda Fire” An investigation was also opened which he speculates may have been set on voluntarily. Governor Kate Brown, who demanded that Oregon be granted federal state of emergency, said the state had never seen such a large amount of wildfire. Throughout the state of Oregon more than 500,000 people, about 10 percent of the total population, have been forced to evacuate their homes.
In California, the “Bear Fire” continues to advance. In Butte County, dozens of homes were destroyed and ten people were found dead. Berry Creek, a town of about 1,200 inhabitants, was largely destroyed by the “Bear Fire”. The smoke created by the fire Wednesday morning had generated a thick blanket of smoke that it had covered the San Francisco Baypartially blocking the sun’s rays from illuminating the region. The anomalous situation had meant that the lights of the cars had to be turned on as well as those of the offices of the skyscrapers despite the fact that it was day. In many areas of the bay, in San Francisco and Oakland, the sky remained orange until much of the morning of 9 September.
According to an estimate by “Cal Fire,” the state’s forest fire department, this year’s major fires in California, on September 8, they had involved more than 800 thousand hectares (8 thousand square kilometers), an area almost as large as Umbria. The fires were also fueled by high temperatures: Sunday in Los Angeles County was 49.4 ° C, the highest ever recorded in the county.
In Washington state on Wednesday a one-year-old boy had died, and his parents had been badly burned while trying to escape from the fire called “Cold Springs”. One of the most affected areas in the state is that of the railway town of Malden where, on Tuesday afternoon, most of the houses were destroyed, including the town hall, the post office, the library and the fire station. Almost 20,000 hectares have been burned throughout the state.
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